Trainwreck Hearts
by BattleCryBlue
Summary: It would have been a lie to call what they had any less than dysfunctional. Pairing:Tony/Steve. Warnings for Steve!Whump, slash, AU, disturbing subject matter, etc.
1. Prologues and Revelations

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**Trainwreck Hearts**

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_by BattleCryBlue_

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**Disclaimer:** I don't own shit.

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**C1: Prologues and Revelations**

**.**

The first time they slept together, they broke the bed.

And the table. And a wall. And three chairs, and a priceless fourteenth-century marble statue that Pepper was bound to kill them for.

That should have been a warning for what they could expect out of the rest of their relationship.

It would have been a lie to call what they had any less than dysfunctional. There was very little healthy about it, in fact. It happened because Tony didn't have to worry about hurting Steve, and Steve didn't have to be perfect for Tony (or so Tony said). But Tony's tongue was as sharp as steel, and Steve was strong but sometimes things didn't bounce off like people thought they did.

Steve had a nightmare one night and woke up to discover he'd broken Tony's nose thrashing in his sleep. He apologized profusely, wrecked with guilt, but the brunette assured him it was nothing at all and he should just go back to sleep.

The next day, Tony "accidentally" locked Steve in a Hulk-proof glass chamber he'd been working on for the Avengers. He'd treated himself out to a nice dinner that evolved into an all-night party.

He'd come home to find Steve a trembling wreck, drenched in sweat, his eyes glassy and unseeing because he was trapped; always trapped. Bodies everywhere; he couldn't move. The ice was his prison. He couldn't even scream.

It took weeks for that one to blow over. Weeks of avoidance and heavy silence and Steve waking up screaming in the night.

Tony didn't know how to apologize. Steve didn't know how to live in a world that had moved on without him. They hurt each other. Tony lied and Steve drew into himself further and further every time they fought.

But they never ended it. Whatever _it_ was, it was what they needed. They needed each other in the violence and sex and sweat-slicked bodies, in the knowing eyes and warm touches when everything was too much to handle. They fought, they physically battled like arch-enemies. The peace was inside, and it felt so good sometimes. But physically? It never lasted.

Maybe, Steve suggested late one night as he nursed a black eye, it was in their nature.

Tony poured himself another drink and watched Jarvis sweep up the remains of his coffee table.

The man behind the iron suit had made it clear, on too many occasions to recall, that they weren't exclusive. Steve nodded and pretended he understood, and watched silently as Tony left with another long-legged blonde.

But the next time they had attended a briefing aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. Hellicarrier and Tony caught Clint making a pass at Steve, he exploded. Their ensuing fistfight knocked out the power in an entire deck and earned them both a stern conversation with Fury and a prompt ejection from the ship.

Steve had never meant to mention it. He really hadn't. He'd accepted his relational position and had allowed his relegation into silence and submission, and they didn't talk about things like this as a rule.

But he had. He'd brought it up and what was done was done.

Because it didn't matter which angle he looked at it from: it hurt. That Tony was so willing to throw himself after anything with two legs while Steve was not allowed a conversation with a teammate burned deeper than any slight before. When he thought about it, what hurt the most was that he had almost been ready to accept the possibility of this beautiful trainwreck. He'd been ready to accept that this was all they would have, and that it would never make either of them completely happy, but that neither of them could be happy without it.

So he brought it up, and the way that Tony looked at him made him feel like a complete idiot. But that was just Tony for you. He'd remarked on more than one occasion that Steve was all the heart they needed and Tony was all the brains they needed. Steve had pretended that bounced off, too. He was no genius, and he knew that. But somehow, it only hurt when Tony pointed it out.

It had been a long moment; dark eyes narrowing into blue ones. Tony was probing Steve's soul for something, and the super-soldier didn't know if his heart was ready for the blow to come but he steeled himself and squared his shoulders anyway, and simply stared back.

"I was wondering when you'd figure it out, meat-head." Tony's words had been sharp but his tone had not, and he smiled into his glass as he took another pull.

Steve wasn't sure what that meant.

Tony took his time setting his glass down on the bar, and then advanced on Steve so suddenly that the super-soldier wound up falling backwards onto the couch. His muffled sound of surprise was muted by a mouth crashing into his, all sharp teeth and hot breath and unrestrained feeling. They had an on switch and an off switch, and nothing in-between.

And so, they decided to give it a try. They wouldn't see anyone else, and they would make a shot at pulling whatever they could out of the rubble of their current relationship. Maybe, Tony shrugged, they could turn it into something worth looking at.

That night, as they lay in bed, Tony watched Steve as the soldier's eyes moved rapidly behind his lids, sweat beading on his forehead as a nightmare dug it's talons into his mind.

If Steve could have seen the expression on his lover's face as the first quiet sound of distress broke through the soldier's lips, he would have understood everything.

Tony pulled Steve into his arms and held him. He pretended that he did it because he was cold. It wasn't concern or fear or tenderness, he told himself. He pretended it wasn't love.


	2. Falling

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**C2: Falling**

**.**

The wind that swept down ninth street was chill and oddly peaceful, just brisk enough to keep silent bystanders from losing themselves in the memories and emotions that were cohabitants of places like this. It was a much-needed anchor in a sea of nostalgia, a balm to wounds waiting to reopen.

King's Hill was a spacious lot that had long ago seen too many gravestones and mausoleums crammed between its iron gates. No-one had been buried there in twenty-eight years, and many of the relatives of the dead had moved away or moved on, and no longer visited. The grass hadn't been cut in weeks, it appeared, and for a location in the heart of Brooklyn, the landscape held an aura of quiet and calm that easily transported one to a time and place where the man beneath the sod was more important than the monument that marked his final home.

Steve Rogers knelt silently in front of a simple stone marker, the kind nobody used nowadays because lavish monuments and intricate symbolism had driven them out of style. Moss and age had dulled the edges of the once-crisp engraving, but the name "James Buchanan Barnes" could still be read clearly. This name, with a date of birth and a date of death, were all that was necessary to mark the habitant of the plot as a war hero and a great man.

Tony didn't know that Steve still came here. He probably wouldn't say much about it, especially considering the regular trips the pair still made to Phil Coulson's memorial site, but the soldier knew Tony didn't like it when Steve got too caught up in the past. Said it was unhealthy, and Steve secretly had to agree with him... but some things were harder to let go of than others.

You'd think that being asleep for seventy years would have dimmed the pain somewhat.

It didn't.

Steve traced the stone-carved letters with his eyes, continuing the ongoing mental conversation the two had shared for months now. His own words in Bucky's voice still made more sense, as illogical as it was. His old friend had always made sense.

A car horn blared on a nearby street, and the super-soldier jumped. He laughed quietly to himself at the image—Captain America startled from his memories by the din of New York—and slowly climbed to his feet. He dusted off his slacks and spent another wistful moment gazing downwards.

His eyes traveled slowly upwards, taking in the sea of headstones lit only by the dim New York streetlights. Some of those stones showed familiar names. Many of them he'd known... shaken hands with, led into battle. Some had been lost as they fought by his side. Still more he had never known, never seen. Their names had been unfamiliar.

He knew them now.

He would never admit it out loud, but there were days... hell, there were entire weeks... when he felt like this was where he really belonged. Maybe the only place. If nature had run its course, he would share a quiet night with these men. Not as a living ghost in a land of sleeping spirits but as a fellow body, cool and still beneath the earth. He would have a plain stone plaque of his own, and it would have his name on it. Nothing else, because his sacrifice would have spoken for him.

Instead he stood, breathing, a transplant in an unfamiliar world, while the natural order stared up at him from uncut grass and faded stone.

"G'night, Buck." The captain mumbled downwards, his voice caught up in the tugging wind. He zipped up his jacket and turned away.

**.**

Steve had moved in with Tony before they'd known this would last. He'd had nowhere to go with S.H.I.E.L.D. off his trust list and the billionaire hadn't blinked before offering him a home, as temporary or long-lasting as he chose.

Steve's duffel sat packed and waiting by the door for almost six months.

He'd never imagined this would be permanent. Even after they'd connected, Tony and Steve had never discussed future living arrangements. They'd simply migrated together, falling into a pace that was neither constant nor simple, but that fit their tumultuous lives like it was tailor-made for them.

And so it was that when Steve drove "home" it was to a forty story tower that could be seen from all corners of the city, and not the white picket fence and golden retriever he'd envisioned for himself in his youth.

The times had changed. They were just waiting for him to catch up.

His old motorcycle was a 1938 Harley Knucklehead 1000, and he'd spent nearly a year and about as much of his earnings hunting it down. The paint was faded and the chrome was dull, but it was one of the few things he'd ever found that seemed to bridge the yawning gap between where he was now and where he'd come from. As much as Tony hated the "outdated death-trap", it had its own spot in the underground parking garage marked by a simple, painted white star. Tony had ensured him that this was in fact, hilarious, and when Steve deigned to grace them with his presence in the 21st century and an up-to-date vehicle, then he could have his full name on it. Steve didn't understand the necessity for having his name on a concrete space so he kept his old bike and Tony kept up his griping.

Steve stepped off the lift onto the 20th story suite to find Iron Man in the kitchen.

Not just Tony, but the full red-and-gold ensemble that the rest of the world both feared and loved. He was sure that Tony was in there, naturally—but finding a huge suit of armor pouring drinks at your wet bar isn't exactly the first thing you expect when you step into your suite.

"What's the occasion?" Steve asked hesitantly when Tony didn't seem to notice his entry.

The suit turned, leveling featureless white eyes at him. Steve wasn't sure he would ever get used to that.

"M'drunk." Said Iron Man, and Steve bravely repressed a grin.

"I can see that. What's with the suit?"

"Pepper says I wear it to feel powerful," one red-armored shoulder shrugged with a mechanical sound. "Thought I would test the theory."

Steve frowned, walking towards the counter. "You need to... feel powerful?"

Tony laughed at a joke to which the super-solider was not privy, and tried to take a drink through his helmet. He paused, and then the face plates folded away one after another. He downed the entirety of his drink in one long, burning swig.

Steve stood by the bar, and waited silently.

"Why don't you just... get angry?" Tony waved his glass, only turning to face the object of his comment when Steve said nothing at first.

"I do get angry," Steve pointed out unnecessarily, "just not as often as you do."

"See, that's it," Tony pointed accusingly at his boyfriend, eye narrowing, "you really think that's enough."

"You know I don't know what you're talking about."

"Oh, don't play so stupid," Tony's voice was rising with his temper, the glass finding a home loudly on the marble countertop. He reached angrily for a bottle of bourbon and poured gracelessly, mostly missing the glass. "Don't pretend this isn't happening. I know that you've got your little martyr persona wrapped around yourself so tightly it's become part of your skin. I know what you think about; what you _don't say._"

Steve didn't realize how hard he was clenching his jaw until the sharp pain made him loosen it a little. "Tony," he warned, voice tight with stress, "you don't know what you're talking about right now."

"I know enough," Tony laughed, swirling the liquid in his cup and listening to the ice cubes clink together. "I know stocks are down, I know the Yankees are on a losing streak, and I know twenty-six theories of quantum physics your little back-in-the-day doctors never even dreamed existed."

Tony was rambling again. Steve allowed his mind to wander. Specifically, to how he was going to get Tony to bed and this mess cleaned up before Pepper came in tomorrow and turned those knowing, slightly scolding eyes on him. She never said it outright, but Steve was fairly certain that she didn't particularly approve of this... of them. He couldn't blame her, honestly. He probably wouldn't have either if he were in her shoes.

"Paris Hilton."

"I don't know who that is." Steve studied the shot glasses on the counter, mentally gauging how much liquor Tony had consumed in his absence. This was an old game anyway, particularly when Tony had any amount of alcohol in him. It no longer bothered him much, oddly enough.

"iPads. The second iPad."

"I don't know what that is, either," the solider inserted plainly, and was ignored.

"Flash mobs. The Kardashian zombie horde. Anything with the word 'social media' attached."

"What are you doing, Tony?"

Steve tried not to sound as exasperated as he felt, while wondering if running through the familiar lines would ever produce a different result. Their script was getting stale, but the super-soldier could barely keep up with his lover when he got like this, all snide remarks and veiled jabs and illogical rants. Steve was a simple man of simple words, and Tony knew it. It was why they played these games. Because Tony needed to feel in control—powerful, like his suit—and this was the only way he knew how.

"Jesus," Tony was saying now, and Steve must have missed something he'd said, "it's like talking to my grandfather."

Steve's jaw was hurting again, and he made a list of all the angry and hurtful things he wanted to say, building behind his tongue, scratching at his lips and begging for air. He locked them away and moved on.

"We're not doing this, Tony," Steve's tone held resignation and carefully guarded sadness as he reached for the drink in the iron-clad hand, "not tonight."

Tony snatched his hand away, and didn't seem to notice when in doing so, he spilled bourbon all over the arm of his suit. "I'm inclined to disagree."

"You're inclined to get drunk," Steve retorted with what was, to his mind, the irrefutable logic that should have ended the conversation. There was no point in trying to have any kind of peaceful interaction with the other man when he was in this state. But old habits were hard to break.

"So?" Tony lunged forward in what was probably meant to be an intimidating gesture; Steve automatically held out his arms to catch him if he toppled.

"Maybe we should—have more conversations when I'm drunk." Tony laughed to himself as he tried to take another sip and missed his mouth.

Steve winced. "I don't think that's going to be a good idea. Ever."

Some days, he really wished he could join his boyfriend in alcohol-induced temporary insanity. That way neither of them would remember the conversation the next day, and they could nurse a hangover together. Somehow, that seemed like a simpler option.

Tony cursed unintelligibly, and Steve gave up on the effort. The solider turned away in disgust, dropping his duffel onto the tile beside the bar. He would pick it up later. For now, he needed to change the outcome of this all-too-familiar situation, and the only way he knew how to do that was by removing himself from it completely.

Glass exploded against his back, and he turned around, wide-eyed, to find Tony standing right where Steve left him. Minus his drink.

"Did you just...?"

Tony answered by swiping another glass off the counter-top, this one empty, and chucking it straight at Steve.

The super-soldier ducked, and the glass exploded against the television behind him. Pepper was going to be... unhappy about that.

"I can't believe you," Steve shook his head, batting away another glass—a bottle, this time—that came sailing towards him. It shattered against his hand and sprayed against the bar. He absently brushed the shards of glass off his sleeve, eying the growing mess distastefully. "I think your immaturity just reached new levels. Congratulations."

"Oh, you haven't seen..." (a pause to burp), "nothin yet."

"I don't think I need to see any more," Steve approached carefully, reaching for Tony.

The explosion that followed was not entirely unexpected.

Steve was no pushover. The super-soldier serum combined with the now-natural strength he honed daily allowed him to stand toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful beings on earth. But when a mechanical suit set at full capacity punched him through a brick wall—and his shield was nowhere to be found—it damn well _hurt._

Steve hauled himself out from beneath the rubble that had once been the glass patio doors and part of the exterior wall, shaking his head and wiping dust from his eyes.

"That was uncalled for," he remarked mildly, dusting chunks of concrete out of his hair.

He had to quell the flash of resentment that churned up in his gut, because Tony was always on his case about having preternatural strength, but this wasn't the first time they'd had to replace a wall because of Tony's reckless temper. It was always Tony who started the physical violence, and yet Steve always felt that he wasn't allowed to retaliate, because Tony never missed a chance to point out the advantage his natural abilities gave him. This was never going to work out unless they saw one another as equals.

The couch that came sailing at Steve's head definitely didn't make him feel like an equal.

The super-soldier braced himself and crossed his arms, heaving upwards to fling the piece of furniture over his head to crash against the wall. The force of the hit still knocked him on his ass and sent him sliding backwards across the marble, all the way out onto the balcony. The wind was howling up the sloped glass surface of the tower, whipping at his hair and making it hard to hear.

"Tony!" Steve barked angrily, hauling himself up, "that's enough!" His bones ached with the force of impact, and his heart ached because _why the hell_ did they always do this?

"What, you can't fight me because I'm human?" Stark was hovering over the rubble unsteadily, his boosters firing out of sync in his disoriented state.

"Dammit Tony, I don't _want_ to fight you!" Steve's restraint snapped like a fraying thread, fists clenching. "Not because you're human, but because you're _you."_

Tony laughed, and there were few sounds that got under the soldier's skin quicker. Because Tony was laughing _at_ him; Tony thought he was stupid or naive or idealistic or one of the hundred other condescending things the billionaire saw in his lover.

And Steve understood. They were not equals.

"Don't hold back, Captain," Tony, now thankfully earthbound, was laughing, barely able to stand up straight, "don't pull your punches just because my bones can break."

"I don't have my shield, Tony," Steve spread his hands imploringly, "I'm not in a suit; I'm not a solider. I'm just me."

"You're always a soldier," Tony hissed, mirth gone, "it's_ who you are_, and you don't even know how to do anything else."

The blood in Steve's veins was boiling, and his head was throbbing and he wanted so badly to lash out, to hurt Tony back. But deep down he knew that wouldn't solve anything. Whatever happened tonight, whatever they said to one another in hurt and anger... Tony wouldn't remember it in the morning. But Steve would, and he would have to carry the regret with him for years if he said anything stupid now.

Breathing heavily through his nose, Steve braced himself as Tony stormed forward, straight towards him. He was convinced the billionaire would take a swing—they were going by the script, here, after all—but instead an armored hand wrapped around the back of Steve's neck and the soldier was being pulled forward, his anger swallowed by a hot, demanding mouth. He hesitated to ever call this kissing because he didn't remember the gesture as being so violent, so harsh and unyielding. He had a hard time associating this with love.

His first reaction, admittedly, was to punch Tony right in the arc-reactor glow of his chest.

Who did he think he was? How did Tony think he could act this way and then try _this_? A part of him was feeling more betrayed that his lover was going off-book, when their relationship didn't work that way, and he had never wanted to badly to swing. Not because Tony wanted him to (and he was sure he did) but this time, simply because Steve was _so damn angry._

But he couldn't. Because this was Tony, and if Steve had ever loved anyone, he loved this mess of a man. And he'd never been more certain that if anyone could ever learn to love him back... it was Tony. They were a disaster. But together, they had hope: anger and flying insults and blinding pain, but also real hope.

An involuntary moan rumbled up out of Steve's chest, and the metal-clad hand on his neck tightened painfully. He tried to push away, planting his fists on the immovable chest in front of him, but whatever was in control of his boyfriend's mind would have none of it. Soon, Steve wasn't going to be able to breathe, and his mind cleared enough to let him know that was a problem.

"Tony, stop..." The gasped words were garbled against that searching mouth,which may have been a mistake because it made the other man moan back and press both hands hard into Steve's neck, almost crushing him. He could feel the bones grinding together, creaking under the unbelievable pressure. The sounds were lost in the wind.

They never did it like this. Steve walked on glass around Tony, always terrified of even scratching his lover because that was who he was: he cared. He felt and ached and loved, and he wouldn't apologize for that even if Tony mocked it constantly. He cared about everyone, and so deeply, and he was so careful around Tony. But if Tony hurt Steve, on the other hand, they never spoke of it. Steve didn't show it; Tony didn't acknowledge it. Because they both knew how much the super-solider could take, and how much stronger he was than the average man.

But sometimes Tony forgot, maybe on purpose, that the great Captain America was not invincible. He was not unbreakable, and Steve knew the day would come when Tony was going to test that theory, willingly or not. He'd been dreading it for the whirl-storm of emotion and insanity that had been the last year and he was determined that when the day came, it wouldn't break them. He wouldn't let it break them.

Even so... he wasn't ready for it to happen just yet. Not now. Not today.

Plying all of his considerable strength, Steve struck a heavy downward blow to Tony's arms, and it damn well nearly ripped the super-soldier's skull off but at least it broke the iron hold. He staggered back, grateful for the air, and Tony looked at him oddly.

"Now you don't want me?" The billionaire tilted his head, voice quiet. Steve heard it clearly, an eerie overtone in moaning wind.

"I want you, Tony." Steve's voice held a desperation and emotion he hadn't meant to betray, and he was suddenly immeasurably grateful that Tony would never remember this conversation. "But not like this. Not any more. This is—"

"This is all we are." Tony hissed, encroaching into Steve's personal space again until they could feel one another's breath on their skin.

"We can be more." The words slipped out, and they were way, _way _off-book now, but Steve meant it. He just wished he'd had the strength to say it when Tony was sober.

Tony laughed in his face, and the predictability of it all hit Steve like a slap in the face. What had he thought would happen? Nothing was going to change.

The punch was predictable, too. Steve rolled with it and gave up trying to be the restrained, diplomatic one.

He swung back, his momentum leaving a fist-sized dent in the concrete because Tony wasn't stupid, and he knew how this was going to play out just as well as Steve did. Maybe better. They traded blows; deflections and blocks all so expected and sure it made him sick. Occasionally one of them would connect with the full force of their respective weapons—Steve his raw strength, Tony his suit—and one of them would go flying. They'd torn Tony's loft apart just like this more times than they could count. Some things never changed.

But tonight there was a change. It was small, and it shouldn't have meant much. It shouldn't have altered everything so drastically.

Tony used his thrusters on Steve. This had never happened before, because despite their mutual brutality and aggression neither of them had ever actually wanted to hurt the other. They avoided lethal tactics by unspoken agreement and part of that was the thrusters on Tony's suit. Not because they were strictly dangerous, but because when they fought like this, Tony didn't hold back. And at full strength, those thrusters _were_ deadly.

Steve recoiled with a cry of pain as heat and light and force combined to blind him, and for a moment it was all he could think of and this wasn't real, because they didn't fight like this. They didn't try to hurt each other. It just happened.

A blast of crushing, white-hot energy collided with Steve's chest and he had no warning. He was flying backwards, smashing through the glass of the balcony railing and spinning out into terrifying nothingness.

He fell.


	3. Broken

**.**

**C3: Broken**

**.**

Six months ago, the team was in Uzbekistan.

A skyhook had been used to transfer soldiers from one plane to another. Steve, Natasha, and Clint had rappelled onto a cargo transport mid-air in the dead of night and taken out the black ops team en route to crash a peace treaty signing in Israel.

Taking out the team had been the easy part. Steve had left the foot soldiers to Hawkeye and the Black Widow. He'd been a little more concerned about the four serum-enhanced mercenaries piggybacking the trip. Predictably, the world was still trying to unravel the serum that had created him and so far these were their best attempts. They were still trying to get it right.

The fight had been short enough. Guys with that much bulk, that much raw, untrained strength, tended not to have a lot going for them in the brains department. But sometimes, they got lucky.

He'd thrown two off the plane, careening out the cargo door and spinning off into the foggy night before the others had even had time to react. One had responded with a spray of bullets from a gun that handled him better than he handled it, and the other went straight for the attack.

They'd traded blows, bone-crushing, no-holds-barred hits landing left and right as they danced around the chaos that was the two assassins and the black ops team locked in battle around them, turning the small space into a warzone.

Natasha took a hit. She stumbled and scrambled for purchase on the mist-clicked rubber matting and lurched dangerously close to the open doors. Steve lunged for her hand and pulled her back inside, his arm wrenching painfully as he caught a hold of a support.

One of his targets, the enhanced merc—had his opening. Cold steel slid between sinew and tissue.

Steve channeled his pain into a burst of adrenaline and managed to get his legs wrapped around the merc's. He twisted, and the larger soldier was moving, falling. The man managed to lodge his hand into Steve's harness and before the super soldier could stop him, the mercenary and Steve's parachute were sliding away into the night.

Steve's grip, slick with blood, slipped.

He remembered catching Clint's eye, seeing the archer's face go pale with sudden understanding. The assassin lunged for Steve's hand, but he was a beat too late. Gloved fingers brushed, black on navy blue, and then slipped away.

The sensation of falling, picking up speed and momentum, spinning in space with no purchase... there was nothing quite so terrifying. He caught flashes of light, brief glimpses of stars and farmhouses blinking down below all in quick succession, too fast to stay orientated. Blood was the only warmth in the chill air, drops splattering onto his clothes, defying gravity, rushing against his face and neck as he spun out of control.

He closed his eyes and refused to scream.

All the breath left his lungs in a painful whoosh as an iron band closed tight around his chest without warning, stopping his fall so abruptly that it knocked the breath from his lungs and left him dizzy. His good hand came up automatically to grip the new support, eyes screwed shut as he tried to get his bearings. He'd never felt so out of control in his life.

"Try using a chute next time, Cap," the mechanical voice in his ear was all the proof he needed that he wasn't dead and hallucinating. Relief flooded his senses. Tony had him. Of course Tony had him.

In a rush of speed and movement, the pair made it safely back to the transport where Natasha was tossing the last body out the bay doors. Steve crumpled onto the deck, his legs made of jello, and tried not to heave as the vertigo slowly subsided. He pretended not to notice the way Clint looked at him or the way that he hovered protectively for the rest of the mission.

That seemed like a lifetime ago.

**.**

This time, there was no iron angel falling out of the sky to stop his descent. There were no strong arms, no flash of white light to signal salvation.

There was only Steve, and the whistle of empty air roaring in his ears.

And then there was pain.

He couldn't hear himself cry out but he felt the sudden rumble exploding up out of his chest, ripped from him by forces outside his control as his body connected with metal and stone. He was falling, sliding, colliding with everything in his path. It seemed to last forever.

When the world stopped spinning around him—or at least, slowed down—he found himself staring up with blurred vision into the midnight sky of New York.

Stark Tower stood highlighted against the skyline above, deceptively calm and peaceful in the clear night.

The soldier drew in a sobbing breath and immediately regretted it. Agony rolled over him in nauseating waves, and his vision turned black.

Several harsh breaths later he was able to convince his body to stay alert, and he reached a trembling hand down to his side, the place from which the pain seemed to be radiating. A three-inch shard of metal was protruding through his side, jutting up angrily towards the tower above like an accusing finger.

It took a beat for everything to sink in as Steve's lethargic gaze slid from the glowing balcony twenty stories overhead and across, taking in the twisting metal and torn cloth of what had once been the awning of the adjoining building. It had stopped his fall, he realized, and probably saved his life. From there he could trace the path of destruction where he had cannonballed downwards through streetlamps and glass overhangs, street signs and broken tree branches. It looked for all the world like someone had dropped an aircraft down into the streets.

Steve wasn't sure how long he simply lay there, trying to rally enough strength to move without blacking out again. He knew it was imperative that he move soon or his body would eventually begin to heal itself around the intrusion. It had happened before with bullets, and he'd been forced to undergo surgery to reopen the wound and remove the offending piece of metal. It didn't help that his post-serum metabolism rejected any form of sedation.

The memories of such procedures were enough to convince him to try again. He grit his teeth and pushed himself upwards, metal sliding slick through damage flesh, tearing new edges and pulling pieces of skin with it.

When the blackness receded again Steve found himself collapsed forward, half on his side, half on his knees, dragging in broken breaths. Blood was welling up between his fingers, around his hand where he pressed it as tight as he dared to the jagged wound.

Another man would have been dead already. The fall alone would have killed another man. He'd been lucky. It had only been a matter of time before something like this had happened.

He dragged his gaze upwards, seeing double as another shower of glass exploded from the balcony so far above the street. It looked like Tony wasn't done raging. In fact, he probably hadn't even noticed Steve fall. The thought sent an unexpected pang through the super-soldier's heart... or maybe that was just residual pain from the gaping hole in his side. It was getting hard to tell.

He didn't blame Tony for this... How could he? Sure, this time Steve had taken the harsher-than-usual brunt of their dysfunctionality, but it could have just as easily been the other way around. He was lucky, if anything: lucky it had been him to hit rock bottom, and not Tony. At least Steve could survive this.

But it was the moment he'd been waiting for.. and he was going to find a way to fix it. He had to.

He could hear sirens in the distance and became slowly aware of the small crowd that had gathered across the street, pointing up at the damage; at Stark towers... at him. Even at one o' clock in the morning there were always people around. He needed to get off the street. Before this thing got blown out of proportion and people started to recognize him.

Fury would just love that hitting the news...

His leather jacket was in shreds, but he managed to pull a fairly intact edge around his side to staunch the flow of blood as he staggered to his feet. Once he let the initial shockwave of agony wash over him he found it wasn't impossible to make his way slowly back towards the entrance to Stark tower. The distance across the street and the small park between the buildings had never seemed so daunting.

The doorman knew Steve and let him in, making some crack about superheroes arguing and maybe next time they should just order both kinds of pizza. He seemed strangely unaffected by the soldier's hunched posture and bloodstained clothing. Maybe he'd been around Tony too long.

Steve grinned around a mouthful of blood and reached with fumbling hands for the phone behind the desk.

It took him far too long to remember the number he needed.

"Clint," he rasped, his eyes fluttering shut in relief when the line was picked up. The assassin worked more missions with S.H.I.E.L.D. than his super-powered counterparts and was consequentially a pain to get a hold of. Tonight, Steve must have had someone watching over him.

"Steve?" The sleep-fogged voice was quick to disappear, and the super-soldier could practically hear the assassin checking the phone's caller ID. Steve had never quite grasped the magic of it, but nowadays people seemed to have ways of knowing exactly who was calling and usually, where from. All Steve knew was that when Tony called him on the tiny, easily-misplaced little electronic device he'd insisted he carry, a little picture of him popped up. That was about as far as Steve had gotten with translating the thing's mysteries.

Something must have alerted the other man to Steve's whereabouts this time, because he knew he wasn't on his own cell. "Where's your phone?"

"Oh, you know me," Steve swiped at a fresh trickle of blood as it dripped down his chin. His fingers were shaking so badly he had to try it twice. "I could never keep track of that thing—" His voice disintegrated into a cough, which wouldn't have been painful in itself if it didn't pull so horrendously at his mauled abdomen.

"Steve," Clint was pulling on his jacket, the soldier could hear it, "I'm coming to get you. Are you safe?"

Steve laughed in spite of the pain, because Clint meant well but he couldn't understand how this worked with Tony. How all of it worked. The assassin was all too ready to see something that wasn't there; to paint Tony as the villain because he'd never really trusted the billionaire. It wasn't like that, but there was no way to explain it properly.

"_Steve_." Clint was the only person the soldier knew who could sound enraged and terrified at the same time.

"Yeah," the effort to speak was exhausting. "I'm fine, just... could use a place to crash tonight..."

Steve absently watched the blood pooling under his boot.

"I'll be there in a few minutes," Barton promised, "stay where you are."

Steve wanted to calm the archer down. He wanted to allay the fears and suspicions that were undoubtedly building in his mind but strangely enough he found that he didn't actually have the energy to say anything more. And then the phone line clicked, and it wasn't hard to let the device slide out of his blood-slicked grip and bounce against the cradle. He didn't bother putting it back properly.

When blurry, ringing alertness faded back in—and when had he blacked out, again?—it was to a familiar face close to his own, shaking him hard.

"You with me, cap?" There was something strained and almost angry in Hawkeye's voice that Steve couldn't understand.

"Yeah," he tried to say, but it came out as a cough again.

Relief flooded the green eyes swimming before his vision, and deceptively strong arms were under his own, hauling him upwards into a fresh barrage of mind-numbing pain.

He caught little more than incoherent snatches of light and sound as he was half-carried, half-dragged out to the deceptively plain-looking SUV that was the assassin's current form of transportation and deposited gently into the front seat.

Even while he was gasping for air like a fish out of water, Steve let his forehead thunk forward against the cool glass and tried his best not to get blood all over the vehicle. It was humiliating enough that he was subjecting Clint to his weakened state... he didn't need to be ruining the man's car, too. The soldier was going to need to do some serious apologizing when he regained the power of speech, he realized.

The opposite door slammed; a key turned in the ignition. The car began to move. The siren lights flashing just outside the window were nauseating and spinning far too fast, so he shut them out behind heavy lids.

Steve remembered nothing more.

**.**

Tony sat—more like sprawled, really—across the only piece of furniture that remained intact in the suite. It was a leather love seat that now sagged in the middle. It had creaked alarmingly and made a loud snapping noise when he'd plopped down onto it, but he was so far past caring that the sound had simply been amusing.

The brunette's mouth was dry and his throat begging for another drink, but his last glass had somehow vanished from his hand and the bar seemed so far away. He wasn't sure if he could make it all the way over there with the room spinning like it was. So decided he stayed put, letting his helmet-clad hair drop back against the arm of the couch.

"Steeeeve," he groaned, scrunching up his face to stare through his visor at the ceiling, "nee'a'drink..." Steve had never specifically said it, but the billionaire knew he didn't like it when Tony drank. He was a nice guy, though—nicer than Tony deserved—so he'd probably get him one anyway.

When his boyfriend didn't answer after a few minutes, the billionaire sluggishly pulled his head up to look around the apartment for him.

"Steve?"

His voice fell flat in the wreckage.

By all accounts, Steve was gone. Not surprising, really. Most of their fights ended like this. They'd have another one in the morning—on a smaller scale as Tony bemoaned a hangover—or better yet, they'd pretend it had never happened.

Well... as long as they got the mess cleaned up in time for dinner. Otherwise, there would be a completely new argument to be had. Story of their lives.

"Gone... Gone, gone," Tony sing-songed to the empty room, his armor-clad hand directing an inaudible symphony in the settling dust. "Steve... you're always gone."

A sharp laugh turned into a dry sob, and Tony settled down into his destroyed love seat and let his eyes slide shut. It was just as well, he supposed.

In so many ways, Steve was always gone.

He was there, but he _wasn't there._ Steve lived in a world of shifting shadows that ran its course parallel to his own; an alternate view of even the simplest moments, the briefest touches, that left the pair looking inwards from two sides of the same mirror.

Tony saw it. Every moment the soldier was so sure went unnoticed. But his thoughts were on his sleeve, his heart turned inside-out to the man who knew him better than he knew himself.

He saw it when Steve spent a beat too long studying a magazine advertisement or frowned at the TV screen like the newscaster was speaking another language. Sometimes the soldier still hesitated when they stepped into the elevator, hoping Tony would be the first to press the button because he still wasn't entirely sure how to work them all.

Tony would never admit it; never breathe it aloud. He had a hard time even thinking it. But he was terrified.

He was scared that one day he would turn around and Steve would dissolve before his eyes. He would fade out of this reality and back into the one from which he'd been ripped. This would all be some cruel dream snatched from his grasp, and the ghost he'd fallen in love with against his will would simply melt back into the pages of time.

Sometimes Steve would pause at the floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the city and just stand there, unmoving, silent. Barely breathing. This could go on for hours. Tony would sit back on the arm of his couch and watch the super-soldier sadly, wishing he could climb inside his head and center him in the here and now... truly bring him back from wherever he went in those moments. The billionaire was convinced that Steve had no idea he did this. He certainly had no idea how much it well and truly terrified Tony.

Eventually the phone would ring or Jarvis would announce a visitor or Tony would clear his throat. Anything really, to break the moment.

Today they'd had one of those mornings.

Tony woke late to an empty bed and had shuffled groggily down the hall to the living area. He caught Steve standing there just like that—a statue at the glass. His hair was brushed (and still so out of style) and he'd made it into a clean pair of jeans, but the edge of his white shirt was hitched up at the hem like he'd never completely finished pulling it on. He didn't move. Didn't breathe. His face was reflected in the glass so Tony could see that his lips were parted just slightly, his blue eyes fixed unseeingly on the traffic below.

It damn well broke his heart.

Tony didn't know what to say. Wit escaped him; logic fled. He had no cure for this.

"I'm going out." He remarked a little louder than necessary, regretting it immediately when Steve jumped.

"Oh," the soldier mumbled, blinking his way back to the present and pulling at the forgotten edges of his shirt, "right..."

Tony bit back the ache in his chest and headed for the fridge, allowing Steve a moment of semi-privacy to recollect his thoughts.

"Yeah, Pepper and I are going to go pick out a little token of appreciation for our new Japanese partners. Something trademark American, you know." Tony contemplated a drink, but considering it wasn't yet ten in the morning he let the thought slide. He reached for the milk instead. "Any suggestions? I was thinking some kind of a show or movie, you know. Sacrilegious and crude, of course."

"Abbot and Costello?" Steve joked dryly as he joined Tony in the kitchen, and it fell even flatter as he caught Tony's grimace.

"Kidding, kidding," the soldier mumbled, catching the fridge door as Tony swung it closed.

"Anyway," Tony cleared his throat, seeking in vain for a way to dispel the mounting tension between them, "I may not be back for a while. Got any plans for the day?"

"Thought I would hit the gym..." Steve frowned at the contents of the refrigerator, and then closed it slowly without pulling anything out.

Tony rolled his eyes and waved a hand impatiently. "Beyond the usual."

"No," the soldier slid onto one of the barstools, crossing his arms on the counter as he blankly watched Tony pour a bowl of cereal. His gaze started to slide back to the windows.

Tony snapped his fingers under his boyfriend's nose, not caring that it was rude. He needed Steve with him in the here and now, and that unspoken need translated into simple assholery sometimes. He could live with that if it kept the displaced soldier grounded.

"Eat up," Tony slid the bowl of cereal in front of Steve and began to make another. He was hyper-aware of how extremely little the other man actually ate, even if he never approached the subject directly. And maybe he was a super-soldier and all that nonsense but Tony was still pretty certain that didn't make him exempt from basic human necessities like eating.

The blond looked like he was a breath away from protesting, and Tony raised a warning eyebrow at him. "You want to be hitting the gym later, you hit that first. I don't want another call telling me that you passed out on the bag again."

"That was _one_ time," Steve griped, but Tony noticed that he picked up his spoon anyway, looking properly contrite.

"Uh-huh."

Tony was, by now, an expert at observing others while seeming completely engrossed in his own activities, and it was a skill that came in handy on a regular basis where Steve was involved. For example he chose to occupy himself now by perusing the morning paper. Subsequently, he ensured that Steve downed his entire breakfast before he snatched both their bowls away and tossed them in the sink.

They barely exchanged another half-dozen words as Tony dressed and groomed. Jarvis eventually alerted him that Miss Potts was waiting in the lobby.

Tony contemplated pressing a goodbye kiss to the soldier's lips, but Steve had already fallen back into his head, gaze fixed unseeingly on the marble counter-top where he still sat.

The billionaire set his jaw and silently left.

**.**

Tony and Pepper stopped for a lazy, late-morning second breakfast and a latte on the way to the outlet center, trading the kind of easy conversation and sharp witticisms that the billionaire had never shared with Steve. It felt like a breath of fresh air, and since he was Tony Stark he felt absolutely no guilt in thinking so.

Pepper inquired after Steve; Tony recited some easy brogue about the joys of boyfriended life. Pepper smiled condescendingly and slid the stack of bills for the last round of repairs to the tower across the table.

He thanked her, his voice heavy with sarcasm, and tucked them into his jacket as they returned to the car.

"A DVD set?" He could hear the disapproval in her voice as he pitched his thoughts on a suitable gift for the Japanese super-company they were slated to sign with the next week. "I don't know, Tony..."

"Oh, come on," the billionaire insisted as he narrowly avoided rear-ending another car in the thick traffic, "it's _witty_."

"It's tacky."

"It is not," Tony pretended to be offended. "It's _American_."

"Americans are tacky."

Tony nodded and conceded the point.

They continued the conversation-slash-argument all the way to the top floor of Bergman's, where Pepper immediately departed his side to explore the racks of foreign wine imports. Normally, he would have joined her—far be it from Tony to turn down a good bottle of Port—but he'd made up his mind for the moment and made a beeline of his own for the media section. So maybe a small part of him was already convinced that this was a terrible idea, but for appearance's sake he thought he should at least make a show of browsing.

The first thing he laid eyes on as he stepped up to the "A" labeled shelf was a thin-bound box set that read "_Abbott and Costello_".

The billionaire made a face and stuck his sunglasses between his teeth so he could pull the box set off the shelf, rotating it in his hands.

"This looks stupid..." He muttered to himself around his glasses, examining the black and white illustrations. "What does he see in these guys?"

He reached to put the box back on the shelf and paused, waging an inner battle of sentimentality.

He might buy them for Steve, he thought abruptly. He had no idea if his boyfriend would appreciate the gesture; it might just make him uncomfortable because buying each other stupid little gifts was nowhere near inside the realm of their relationship.

It might be nothing, just a meaningless little token of good humor. But on the other hand it might mean everything... _change_ everything.

"You know, I'm really not sure how cheap, Asian-made DVD sets are going to make a good impression on these guys..." Pepper was thinking out loud from the next aisle, humoring Tony's poor taste in gifts by joining the search. Clearly, she hadn't found any satisfactory vino.

"Agreed," Tony struggled silently before finally tucking the box under his arm.

Pepper rounded the corner. "So... classic engraved cigar case?" She raised an eyebrow at him.

"Yeah, let's do that."

Tony followed her to the register and paid for the DVD's while Pepper stepped outside to take a call. At least he could give himself an A for effort, he congratulated himself inwardly. He even had the cashier gift-wrap the box in an obnoxious white and blue polka dot print that looked slightly retro if you squinted at it. Steve would appreciate that, he hoped.

The self-encouragement was admittedly, mostly to quell the little tickle of uncertainty that blossomed in the pit of his stomach at the overly-sentimental idea of buying a gift for his boyfriend. Sure, he wouldn't have thought twice about it if Steve were a woman... but he wasn't, and they didn't bullshit one another that way. In a lot of other ways, yes. But romanticism had no part in their lives and it was something neither of them had questioned yet.

Tony wasn't an idiot. He knew Steve wanted more out of this; out of _them_. But Steve had always been a little (a lot) old-fashioned and who were they kidding? They were two extraordinary men in an ordinary, extremely hostile world, and if they could give each other a little comfort in darkened moments and passionate nights then no-one had to be the wiser. But anything more complex? It was out of their league. It was dangerous and controversial and compromising and it just didn't fit.

Yes, Tony Stark was madly in love with Steve. But at the moment he was the only one who knew that and he fully intended to keep it that way, because Tony Stark _didn't do love._

Tony returned that evening to an empty, eerily quiet apartment. Steve's cell phone sat, forgotten as usual, in its charging cradle on the shelf. Tony picked it up with a gentle smile. It was an expression that faltered when he saw the two missed calls from Clint Barton and that was suddenly all it took to sour his mood completely.

He realized with sudden, astounding clarity that maybe _he_ had been the one who had been lying to himself all along.

Steve was already miles away in his mind. It was only a matter of time before he left physically, too.

Anger and disgust coiled up in his stomach like a venomous snake, sapping away the good mood of the day and bubbling inside like a reactor slowly building to critical mass.

He dropped the gift-wrapped box onto the table and started making drinks.


	4. Sleep

**.**

**C4: Sleep**

**.**

He was cold. Horribly, unbelievably cold. His eyes were open, but he couldn't see anything. A foggy white film had descended over his vision, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't close his eyes.

Bodies of the dead. The report of artillery. Fighters overhead, bombs were falling.

The countryside was all on fire.

A low, intense voice that sounded vaguely familiar was buzzing somewhere close to his ear, spewing words in a language he couldn't understand. Occasionally a second voice would answer the first... quieter, deeper. Periods of silence punctuated the strange atmosphere; moments when even the deafening sounds of exploding mortars faded out completely, like when Tony had the news on but the sound off.

The sound was off. It was what first tipped him off to the shifting shades of reality buzzing in the gray space around his consciousness. After so many years it was a feeling he readily recognized... because it felt familiar. He'd spent more time in pseudo-awareness, trapped in his own mind, than he had awake. Years could pass this way, he knew. He'd missed too much already.

He fought his way back. Sifting through color and thought, throwing out elements that were clearly fabrications of his own mind and memory, latching onto the lifelines of what he assumed to be truth.

The only thing that remained consistent was the unbelievable coldness that seemed to be seeping straight into his bones.

Two patches of warmth interrupted the cold: one on his upper arm, hot and tight like a brand being pressed to his skin. The other on his left side, piercing through muscle and tissue to tickle at his internal organs, sparking pain and memory with it.

He remembered.

_Tony,_ he thought with a hollow ache.

He couldn't resist hoping as memory flooded back in that maybe, his lover hadn't even noticed he was gone yet. If he had some time, he was sure he could get back and fix this... this mess. He wasn't sure what time it was; what day... But it couldn't have been long if he was still in this much pain.

They'd needed this, he realized. This had needed to happen.

He'd been a moth drawn to the light, he'd joked with Clint about moving in with Tony.

Clint had been strangely silent until Steve prodded him for some response.

_What are you going to do when you touch it?_ Clint had wanted to know. _The light. Don't get burned, Steve._

Don't get burned.

Steve. _Steve._

"Steve?"

His eyes were open, he realized.

"Shit, he's awake."

"Shit," echoed the deeper voice. "The sedatives won't—"

"It's okay. He can handle it."

"I know. But he shouldn't have to."

"Just finish."

"Working on it. Keep him still."

"Steve?" A face intruded upon his shaky vision, all worn lines and soft green eyes.

"Clint..." Steve found the name hard to mumble past split and swollen lips, and he licked the chapped skin experimentally. "What's... what's going on?"

Hawkeye said something in rapid Russian. He sounded relieved, but beyond that, no sense could be made of the phrase.

Steve blinked.

"Sorry," Clint gave a strained smile, and Steve distantly noticed how hard the archer was gripping his arm. "Good to see those baby blues again, my friend."

Steve's gaze slid sluggishly across to the figure hunched over his side. It took him a moment to recognize Doctor Banner. He hadn't seen the other man in months.

"Bruce," Steve must have sounded surprised, because the doctor looked up at him and smiled tersely.

"What he said," Bruce nodded his head towards Hawkeye, raising one arm to wipe his forehead with the back of his wrist. His hands were covered in blood. "Wasn't looking so good there for a bit, Cap."

Steve frowned, head falling back because holding it up at all was exhausting.

Clint's other hand snaked its way into Steve's, and it was only then that the soldier realized how tightly his fingers had been twisted in the sheets beneath his body. He transferred that iron grip to the hand in his own, trying to breathe through the agony. Subsequently, he tried not to crush the fragile human bones in his grip. The thought kept him centered; gave him something to focus on. Clint probably knew how much he needed that.

He was hyper-aware of the sensation of a needle sliding, slick and cold, through his torn flesh.

"—a lot of blood, but we managed to get a hold of an IV," fading in and out of hearing, Clint was saying in his best soothing voice. It was a tone he reserved for children and Natasha and victims of unspeakable wars... and Steve.

"Bad?" Steve gasped, his body choosing that moment to make him aware of the fact that he'd recently fallen off of a skyscraper.

Something flickered through Barton's eyes; something too quick and complex to catch. "Yeah," he answered quietly, not bothering to lie, "it's bad, Steve."

Steve spent the next hour in agony-induced delirium, the pain seeming to build with every moment he spent in consciousness. But conscious he remained, counting every one of the forty-two stitches that were pulled through his inflamed and bleeding side, clenching onto Clint's hand and trying his damnedest not to hurt him, tying to simply remember how to breathe.

In and out.

Colors changed and faded, voices toned in and faded out. There were moments when he felt like he was high, others when dying would have been a welcome retreat. If he'd felt this kind of pain before he didn't remember it.

A dog was barking somewhere in the twilight gray. A car drove over a manhole, and the lid clattered and rang down the empty street. Glen Miller drifted through an open window. Mom probably had dinner ready. It smelled like stew. Where had she gotten the money for groceries? He needed to find a second job; needed to fix this. Needed to try enlisting, one more time...

"Hey. Still here, Cap?"

It seemed like years before Clint was shaking him again, slapping his face harshly and commanding him to return to full awareness.

The super-soldier blinked dully, bringing lines and shapes and colors into better, though not perfect, focus. Bruce stood across the room at a stainless steel sink, washing off the blood that was now caked up to his elbows. He didn't remember the pain stopping... but upon further inspection that was because it hadn't. It was difficult to differentiate the feel of hands sifting through his internal organs and the raw pain left in the aftermath of... whatever Bruce had done. Whatever he'd done to himself.

"You need to... get rid of some stuff..." He slurred at Clint, because if he said much else he might crumble.

Looking tired, Clint pretended to throw an appraising look around his apartment, small and filled from floor to ceiling with industrial shelving and metal weaponry cases. Though jammed to overflowing with gear and personal affects, it couldn't really be called messy. It was simply Clint.

"Home is home," the archer replied simply, allowing the first expressions of real mirth to drift across his features.

"I haven't... n't been home in years..." Steve stared through half-lidded eyes at the wall, thinking of a tiny white house in Brooklyn with peeling paint and sagging eaves. He didn't realize how that had sounded until after he'd said it.

"I don't know," Clint's tone still held that uncharacteristic gentleness, a sound that would have been more unnerving to the solider if he'd been fully aware of his surroundings.

Tired eyes, drooping bags beneath them. Sad smiles. His mother was dead.

"I think you've got more than one home waiting for you." Clint hadn't noticed the soldier's mental lapse.

"Tony... Tony's home." _Tony is my home._

Clint said nothing, and Steve didn't need to look at his face to know how much that wasn't at all what the archer had wanted to hear.

Thank god for Clint. Thank god for someone who knew when to stay silent and stay strong. The soldier was fairly certain it was a skill Steve had personally abandoned about a year ago... about the time he'd moved in with Tony. It wasn't hard to pinpoint the event as the day things had started going downhill—just hard to admit it.

Bruce was saying something from across the room, wiping his hands on a dishrag. He approached carefully, picking his way around stacks of boxes and piles of magazines. He pried the soldier's eyelid open and gave a him a critical once over and then tossed a few quiet sentences at the assassin who still sat by Steve's head.

Through blurring vision, Steve watched the doctor hand over two small bottles of... something, before sliding into his jacket and swinging a suitcase-sized bag over his shoulder.

As the door shut behind Bruce, Clint was saying something reassuring to Steve, a warm hand on his cold forehead. The soldier couldn't make out a word of it, but he allowed himself to remember that here, for now, he was safe. He shivered in the aching cold, and turned his forehead into that soothing warmth.

"Sleep."

He did.

**.**

Few things in the chaotic new world of 2012 were as ugly and colorless as sleep.

Most people remembered their dreams. They discussed them fondly and skeptically and traded laughter with one another over misplaced imagery and seemingly-random memories. They were sad, they were funny, they were sweet.

Steve awoke, and sold his soul for the strength to forget his dreams.

Clint was singing out loud to himself, toneless and lazy. He leaned back in a metal chair and peeled an orange with a knife the size of his arm, impaling the blade in the table when he finished with it. Steve watched him silently, paying undue attention to the way deft fingers picked the piece of fruit apart.

"They say watching people is creepy," Clint's voice broke the stillness. "I say its the only way you really learn anything about them."

The archer had never moved, never turned a moment's gaze towards Steve. He flipped the magazine in his lap and took a bite out of his orange.

"How long?" The soldier rasped.

"Have you been watching me?" The archer spared a glance and a half-smile. "About fourteen seconds. You've been out cold for about ten hours, on the other hand."

Steve frowned at the ceiling, trying to convince his lethargic brain to calculate the current time from that information.

"Eleven o'clock. You're welcome." The archer approached the bed, squatting by Steve's side to examine the red-stained dressings wrapped around his abdomen.

"I have to... have to go," Steve came to the conclusion slowly, but made no move to sit up. He didn't think he'd be able to quite yet.

The silence that followed was loaded and heavy. Steve could physically feel all that Clint had not yet said; wanted to say, needed to. They knew each other too well by now.

"You have to leave him."

The words were so calm and final, like it was the only possible solution.

Steve laughed aloud. He couldn't help it. The sound was torn from him, sparked by the ridiculousness of the whole situation.

Clint didn't look amused.

"I'm not leaving him."

Hawkeye's jaw was visibly clenched and he turned away, standing and moving across the room as if he couldn't stand to look Steve in the eye for another second.

"Clint," Steve reached out with his words, trying to placate, to soothe whatever damage he'd inadvertently done. "I know what you think—"

"You don't," the assassin's words cut through Steve's like steel, leaving no room for argument or elaboration. He refused to turn around again and face the super-soldier but Steve could read the anger in the line of his shoulders, rolling off of him in palpable waves.

"You have _no idea_ what I think," the assassin pressed on, and the words came out like poison.

Steve swallowed hard and pressed his aching head back into the borrowed pillow. He couldn't help but wish for Tony's familiar smell in the fabric, the cologne and musk that were so uniquely Tony, usually tinged by equal parts engine grease and alcohol. The billionaire wold call him crazy if he knew but when Steve was hurt—physically or emotionally—there was nothing in the world that sounded better than curling into his lover's arms and scent and simply existing. No words, no pressure. Just being. Healing.

Even now, after everything—that was what he wanted most.

Clint was suddenly close to him, clasping the soldier's face in both his hands. Steve's eyes snapped to the green ones of his friend, bewildered.

"You're really, truly, insane, aren't you?" Clint breathed, shaking the soldier gently as he searched his eyes. "You're not—you can't—really be thinking about going back... pretending that nothing happened?"

"I have to," was all the Steve could honestly say.

"Dammit, Steve!" The archer hissed, "you came inches—_moments_ from..." The archer's voice cut off, and he swallowed hard, seeming to need a moment to compose himself. "If I had been a few minutes later—if you hadn't called me; if I hadn't answered my phone—"

"Clint," Steve cut his friend off, rallying enough strength to lift a heavy hand to clasp the archer's wrist, "I'm okay."

"You're not," was the simple response, "not as long as you're with him."

Steve swallowed, wondering why those words were so hard to hear. "You don't understand," was the only, and possibly the lamest thing that he could think of to say.

"I understand that I pulled you out of his building covered in blood and glass. I understand that Banner pumped four pints of blood back into your body before he was convinced you'd wake up again." Clint was angry—it was in his voice, quiet and cold. In the line of his shoulders and the color of his eyes.

"You didn't have to come," Steve retorted in anger before he really thought about it.

Clint pulled back like he'd been burned. "You're right. I didn't," he glared at the super-soldier, rage burning behind his gaze like a fire Steve could physically feel, "but I came anyway."

The meaning of his words went unspoken: _I came. Tony didn't._

"You're not immortal, Steve," Clint's face was shrouded in the darkness, shadows hiding his eyes, "you can be hurt."

"I know."

"You can be killed."

Steve swallowed. "Yeah, well we'll see about that."

"I guess we will."

Steve said nothing more.

Clint left his side and returned to his chair and his magazine, his posture radiating anger.

Steve wasn't sure when his body betrayed him, but at some point his eyes had closed. Confusion, hurt, and worry plagued his mind as he slipped soundlessly back into darkness.

**.**

Clint and Steve had fallen together, like coins into a slot machine. There had been no defining moment or sudden revelation that cemented their friendship. They were both men whose lives were ruled by their occupations, and whose occupations were governed by skill, composure, and rationale. They worked together, even lived together in some cases. Fought together, and for the same things. It simply made sense.

Shortly after the incident with the Chitauri, they'd been called back together. That second mission had been... ugly.

Steve remembered finding Clint sitting alone on the empty air deck of the S.H.I.E.L.D. hellicarrier. Selfishly, a small part of him wanted to turn away; find his own isolated corner to sit, to shield his eyes and nurse his aching heart. They'd lost so many men... too many men. He felt the desperate need to pull himself together before facing the rest of his team.

He didn't turn away.

The soldier approached and sat quietly down next to the archer, glancing at the single broken arrowhead Clint was turning over and over in his hands. Their knees touched, warm through canvas and cloth. Steve crossed his arms tight over his chest and leaned back, letting the stillness and warmth act as a gentle balm to his raging headache and crashing adrenaline.

They'd sat there for hours, undisturbed, quiet and thoughtful in their mutual exhausted haze. Neither spoke a word to the other. They didn't feel the need to.

Eventually one of the deck agents came hunting for Clint, and Steve had retreated to the quarters he was sharing with Tony. The billionaire was grieving too—looking for validation at the bottom of a bottle and wailing his anger and hurt out at anyone who came within hearing distance. The rest of the team was giving him a wide berth unsurprisingly, but Steve didn't have that luxury.

After that, Steve and Clint had simply coexisted in a peaceful way. It might even be called actively positive, some days. They worked together like a well-oiled machine, needing little action and fewer words to communicate. Their relationship had always been comfortable and effortless, easy, and in a world full of Tony, that was a welcome port in the storm.

Tony, predictably, had a possessive streak a mile wide, but considering theirs was a brand new relationship at the time and he wasn't keen on nuking it right away, he made a valiant effort not to read anything into the growing friendship. Sure he made regular jabs about the pair, and was particularly vicious about the archer when he was inebriated, but Steve had never given him any reason not to trust him.

Tony and Clint on the other hand could barely stand to be in the same room as one another. Tony turned his weaponized words against the assassin at every possible turn, and Clint refused to work smoothly with the billionaire, causing more than one hitch in their operations since then.

It took Steve months—far, far too long—to begin to suspect that this was his fault. He'd gotten as far as acknowledging the problem. Fixing it, on the other hand, was proving to be a bit more difficult.

Clint was convinced that Tony was unhealthy for Steve. He'd never said it outright—not until today—but it was in the little comments. It was in all the things he didn't say. It was in the way he looked at Tony sometimes, after something he said to the soldier. It was in the averted glances and clenched jaws, the tensed shoulders and furrowed brows.

Steve didn't know what to do. And so he did nothing.

Clint glared and Tony jabbed and Steve kept his head down. It was the best they could manage. Until now.

Everything was about to change.


	5. Home

**.**

**C5: Home**

**.**

Steve awoke to the sound of gunfire.

By the time he understood that it was hailing on the thin roof and rattling windows, his heart was racing and he'd shot halfway into an upright position. His body was quick to punish him for this knee-jerk reaction, and he cradled his ripped abdomen and tried to get a grip on his surroundings.

It was daylight, but the light coming through the single uncurtained window was dim and gray, lending an eerie caste to the stacks and piles of gear that lined the walls and shelves. More boxes, crates, and lockers loomed around the single mattress on which he lay, looming over the cot like accusing figures. For some reason the cramped space made him nervous.

The soldier carefully shifted upright, wedging his bare feet into the narrow clear space on the floor that served as a walkway from the bed straight forward to the kitchen. Standing was another matter, and the first time he tried he found himself falling gracelessly back to the mattress, breathing heavily and biting his lip to keep from crying out. It hadn't felt this bad when he was immobile but he supposed he'd deserved that.

The second attempt was marginally more successful, and with the support of the wire-grate shelves to his immediate left he was able to remain standing. Thankfully the shelves were sturdier than they looked. He limped his way to the window and only source of light, his body making itself aware of every forgotten bump and bruise as he did so. He caught hold of the thin sill with sweat beading on his brow, feeling extremely accomplished for making it the short distance.

Clint lived on the second floor of a small, extremely old apartment complex that was probably violating a dozen different health and safety codes simply by existing. The sounds of the city roaring by and the dreary rain reminded Steve of the apartment in which S.H.I.E.L.D had put him up before he'd joined the Avengers. Minus all the stuff. He'd never had the heart to collect much. Even now, living with Tony, most of his personal belongings could fit into an army duffel.

The single window overlooked the complex parking lot where rows of carports housed the tenants' vehicles. Steve had to squint for it, but he was eventually able to pick out the dark SUV Clint had picked him up in... yesterday? The day before? Time had become obsolete. The assassin was leaning in the passenger side of the vehicle, wielding rubber gloves and a large bottle of bleach.

Steve felt slightly sick. He resolved to send Clint a check for the damage he'd done to the car. He didn't remember much of what had happened last night (if it had really only been one day) but he did remember being soaked in his own blood, almost drowning in it. He wasn't sure why, out of everything, that was the detail that stuck.

Turning away from the window and the hail that still barraged it angrily, Steve limped gracelessly into the small bathroom on the other side of the kitchen. His breath hitched when he caught sight of himself in the mirror, all mottled skin and bloody bandages. He looked like he'd been hit by a train, and felt it... though he supposed the truth was just slightly more startling. He was wearing Clint's clothes, he noticed. Guilt spiked again through his mind, leaving a splitting headache in it's wake.

How had everything gone so wrong?

Making a pointed effort not to look at himself again in the small mirror, Steve ran a hand gingerly through his hair and breathed out slowly. He tried to take stock of his body; to get an idea of where all the pain was coming from. If he'd broken any bones, they'd begun to heal already. He supposed he should be counting his blessings and not his stitches. All told, he'd gotten off easy. Working his jaw, he reached for the faucet.

"What are you doing?"

The voice startled him, and Steve latched onto the flimsy metal sink in front of him so quickly it made the pipes creak in protest as he nearly pulled it out of the wall.

Clint was at his side in an instant, supporting him when the soldier's sudden movements and burst of adrenaline sent the room spinning.

"Idiot..." Clint swore as he pulled the soldier back out towards the kitchen and pushed him down to sit on a sturdy metal ammunition case. "What the hell are you doing on your feet?"

"I—" Steve rasped, but if he was honest he had no idea what he'd been doing or looking for, "needed to stretch," he finished dumbly.

Clint scoffed. "How about you 'stretch' when your intestines aren't falling out through your ribs, huh? Christ, Rogers."

Properly scolded, Steve tightened his arm where it curled around his aching side and fixed his eyes on the worn, but shockingly clean linoleum beneath his bare feet.

Clint was silent for a moment, but eventually pulled up another crate next to the sink to sit beside his friend. "How are you feeling?" He asked eventually, his voice gentler now.

"I'm still breathing," Steve tried for a lopsided grin. It fell away quickly.

Clint nodded. Silence reigned between them, made less uncomfortable only by the barrage of rain against the window. At least the hail had stopped, Steve thought gratefully. Now he could hear himself think.

"Can we talk about this?" Clint asked awkwardly at last, his voice barely louder than the rain.

"About what?" Steve clenched his jaw.

"About what happened."

Steve wanted to say _no_, wanted to power through this until he could get back on his feet and back to Tony, who was doubtless a wrecked mess by now... whether he realized what had happened or not. But Clint had helped him, had come to pull him out of his own mess when he was too weak to help himself... had probably saved his life. He owed him more than excuses and deflections.

"Yeah," he responded quietly. "What do you want to know?"

Clint clearly hadn't expected such an easy surrender, and Steve could hear his surprise in the moments of quiet that followed.

"Well, I guess... what _did_ happen, Steve?" There was that all-too-familiar undercurrent of bitterness hiding in Clint's voice, but it was clear that he was also making a real effort to understand. To be supportive and withhold his judgment, for what that was worth. The olive branch was clear.

Steve swallowed. "I fell."

Clint's silence was loud.

"You fell." A statement, not a question, as if he was giving Steve the chance to revise it.

"Yeah."

Clint nodded, hands clasped in front of him as he leaned forward on his knees. "Care to explain the burns, then?"

Steve frowned, and tried to remember if he'd actually been burned at any point.

Clint saw his confusion. "You had burns," he clarified, "all over your neck and chest. "Call me crazy, but they kind of looked like thruster burns."

_Oh._

He must have been quiet for too long, because Clint was giving him a veiled look of worry.

"What happened, Steve?"

"I don't know."

Clint looked like he was gearing up to get angry again, a response that was probably more than justified by Steve's stubbornness and evasive answers, but something in the soldier's expression stopped him.

"Look, I don't know how to say this," Clint tried for brutal honesty, "or how to put it in a way that isn't going to ruffle your feathers or put you on the defense. You know I'm not much for words."

"Just say it," Steve's tone was defeated, eyes fixed firmly on the floor.

Clint pursed his lips. "Something's gotta change, Steve."

"Yeah. I know."

"I know we aren't the most functional people in the world..." A smile that was almost real ghosted over Clint's face, "but we're all we've got. If we can't treat each other right... well. Nobody else is going to."

"What do you want to hear?" Steve twisted his hand in his borrowed shirt to hide a fresh wave of pain coursing throughout his body. "I'm not leaving Tony. That isn't an option."

"Yeah, I got that."

"This—what happened—it wasn't his fault."

"That, I didn't get."

Steve allowed his eyes to flutter shut in brief frustration, his tone growing sharp in anger and pain. "Would you be this paranoid if it had been the other way around?"

The question wasn't fair, and he knew it. But he didn't know how much more of this he could take.

"If Tony had been the one to fall. If I'd been okay. Would you even be having this conversation?"

"No," Clint answered bluntly, and he didn't seem to have to think about it, "I wouldn't. Because never in a million years would I believe that you would hurt Tony, even unintentionally. You treat the guy with kid gloves. You think no-one notices?"

The soldier swallowed and looked away.

"That's the difference between you two, Steve. You would never hurt him."

"He didn't mean to hurt me," the simple words admitted more than the soldier had meant to.

"I know," Clint hesitated, and reached awkwardly for Steve's arm, "that's what really freaks me out."

Steve shrugged Clint off and stood. He pretended not to need the steadying hand that quickly returned to support him, holding him upright and giving him space at the same time. In that moment he cursed himself for all that he was putting Clint through. The archer didn't deserve this.

"Stay here, Steve," there was something so broken in Clint's voice, like he was just running through the motions of what he already knew to be a hopeless play.

"Sorry about the clothes," Steve mumbled in place of a reply, feeling exhausted. "I'll have them cleaned and sent back."

"You don't need to worry about that."

Steve was sweating again by the time he made it back to the mattress, sitting shakily and reaching for the now-clean boots that sat nearby. He didn't answer.

"Steve. _Please_."

The soldier faltered, fingers slipping on laces, but still couldn't meet the assassin's eyes. The words nearly undid him, nearly caused his weak resolve to crumble entirely. He'd never felt so low.

Clint stood, silent and still, simply watching the soldier. Simply waiting.

Steve released a shaky breath and pulled on his left boot. By the time he had finished lacing them both up, the simple task of leaning over was putting enough strain on his damaged side to leave him covered in sweat and feeling dizzy.

It took him a moment as he sat up, gripping the edges of the mattress hard enough to make it creak in protest, to notice Clint standing in front of him with a heavy black jacket in his hand. He accepted it gratefully with shaking hands, and didn't protest when Clint gently helped him pull it on.

The archer retreated to lean against the counter in the kitchen, letting Steve have a moment to regain his composure. For what seemed like hours, Steve slumped there, panting, and Clint tossed a folded knife back and forth between his hands, staring stubbornly out the rain-drenched window.

He shuffled gingerly into the kitchen, hand pressed protectively to his burning side.

"Thanks, Clint," he murmured quietly, joining the archer in watching the heavy rain trace paths of fractured light and color down the glass. "For everything."

The archer pocketed his knife, and said nothing.

"I should go."

"It's raining."

"I know."

Clint dropped his head into his hand, rubbing at his forehead tiredly.

He didn't offer to drive Steve home.

Steve didn't offer to stay.

**.**

Tony woke up face down in his own mattress. He must have shed the suit sometime in the night, because it was nowhere to be seen. His sheets were a twisted, rumpled mess and his head had become home to a splitting headache that could have woken the dead with its incessant pounding, but otherwise the place looked spotless. He must have been out cold if the combination of Jarvis and the maids cleaning up hadn't woken him.

"Sir," Jarvis was announcing patiently for probably the umpteenth time, "Doctor Banner is in the lobby. I informed him that you were indisposed, but he insisted on waiting for you."

"Banner?" Tony frowned groggily, running a hand through his messy hair and down over his face, "what the hell is he doing here?"

Jarvis did not grace him with a response, waiting patiently until Tony had hauled himself up and into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. One of his mechanical creations, specifically designed for post-hangover mornings, waited by his bathroom door with a tall bottle of Voss and a handful of aspirin.

"Good boy," Tony told the mechanical arm as he chugged the pills and replaced the bottle.

The living area was empty. The broken furniture had been hauled away, the rubble and glass swept up, and the mess generally compacted into the empty floors and conspicuous lack of furnishings. The hole in the wall had been neatly covered over in plastic, with a note on the mercifully intact bar to let him know contractors would be in at four to patch it up.

Sitting beside the note on the bar was a slightly dusty, gift-wrapped package with a rumpled bow. The billionaire spent several long moments standing where he was, staring down at it. He wasn't sure why, but some niggling little worry inside him was convinced that it had more meaning than was immediately apparent.

Shrugging when memory didn't return, Tony fetched a bottle of juice from the refrigerator and stood quietly at the window, eying the shattered glass balcony and wondering why the damage there sparked such a strange uneasiness in his gut.

"Sir, Doctor Banner is in the elevator," Jarvis intoned, "shall I grant him access?"

"Yeah, sure, let him in," Tony waved the voice away, frowning one last time at the missing balcony glass before turning away to greet his guest.

"Bruce," Tony opened his arms in welcome as the doctor stepped off the elevator, "to what do I owe this pleasure?"

"Oh, just thought I'd stop in," Bruce shook Tony's hand like it was a piece of dead meat, his gaze traveling over the empty room appraisingly. His eyes lingered on the plastic sheets and broken glass, but he said nothing about it.

"Well, it's always lovely to see the rest of the freak show," Tony grinned, stepping behind the bar, "can I get you a drink?"

"Oh, no," Bruce waved him off, "I've gotta drive."

"Eh, suit yourself. I guess it is a little early," Tony shrugged. He watched Bruce take in the room, as if searching for something. "You'll have to forgive the mess, I'm afraid. Going through a bit of a remodel."

"I can see that," said the doctor quietly, eyes darting, drinking in everything that wasn't there. He finally turned dark eyes to Tony, that ever-present half-smile giving the billionaire the impression that the doctor had a secret to which he wasn't privy. "Didn't like the color scheme?"

Tony shrugged, still trying to gauge the other man's thoughts. "Eh, it was more of the whole vibe, if you know what I mean. We had kind of an earthy, neutral-tone going on. I'm looking for something a little more classy."

"French, perhaps?" Bruce trailed a finger over the edge of the bar, checking it as if for dust.

"I was thinking of keeping it local, actually," Tony narrowed his eyes, "maybe something a little retro."

"Steve would like that."

For some reason, the comment irritated Tony. "Yeah, that's what I was thinking," he lied.

"Speaking of..." Bruce glanced around again, frowning, "where is he? Steve?"

Tony shrugged one shoulder, wondering why he felt like there was something huge he was missing here. "Out doing whatever Steve does, I would suspect. We don't exactly keep each other on a running satellite feed. It's a little something called 'trust'."

Bruce nodded knowingly, and that put the billionaire on edge even more.

"Uh, sorry. What are you doing here, exactly?"

Bruce looked at him. There was no animosity there, or blame or hostility of any kind... simply the amused, slightly condescending glance of a teacher who knew infinitely more than his student.

"Can't I stop in to say hello, Tony?" Bruce spread his hands, but it was that stupid half-smile, both knowing and pitying, that got under the billionaire's skin.

"Not smiling like that, you can't," Tony pointed at Bruce accusingly with his juice bottle.

"Sorry."

They were quiet for a few long, thick moments, and Tony still wasn't comfortable with the way Bruce was studying the shattered balcony so intently.

"Something I can help you out with?" Tony tried again, "you here to talk me into something for Fury? Cause I gotta say, he really should have sent someone with more curves—"

Bruce was waving him off dismissively again, smiling, "no, no, Tony, relax. I just wanted to see how you and Steve were doing."

"We, are doing just fine," Tony made sure to stress the "we." "Happy as larks, and all that."

"Uh-huh."

Tony _really_ didn't like the tone of _that._ "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Nothing, Tony. Don't be so defensive."

"Well, I can't help it," Tony took a long swing of his juice, emptying the bottle, "you're creepin' me out, doc."

Banner laughed at him, and damn but that was starting to get on his nerves. Tony tossed his empty bottle into the trash and slumped down the stairs.

"Well, you look busy...'' Bruce nodded, as if to himself. "So I guess I'm just... gonna go."

That was unusually relieving to hear, and Tony smiled graciously as he followed the doctor towards the elevator.

"Well, don't let the door hit you on the way o—"

Tony saw stars.

The billionaire blinked at the spinning ceiling when his vision cleared, hot pain radiating out from his chin. He was flat on his back on the marble tile, he realized. He wasn't sure when that had happened. He breathed out, touching his chin gingerly. It took a moment for his eyes to slide up to Bruce, who stood where he had left him by the elevator, rubbing his right hand.

"Did you just punch me?"

The doctor looked down at his hand, flexing his fingers experimentally, "yeah. I guess I did."

Tony nodded, blinking, and hauled himself up into a sitting position, "okay, then. Why?"

"I don't know, Stark," the doctor shrugged, his eyes fixed distantly on the windows, "I guess we'll find out."

Bruce waved mildly as he stepped into the elevator, leaving Tony where he was sitting, rubbing his jaw. The doors closed between them with a soft chime and the billionaire was left sitting on his ass and trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

Working his jaw, he glared across the room at Steve's forgotten cell phone. Not that his boyfriend ever answered it even when he had it on him, but at that particular moment, Tony would have killed to be able to call him.

Standing with some effort, Tony leaned on the bar and seethed down at that stupid package with that stupid wrapping paper and that stupid bow. He remembered buying it; remembered why he'd picked out that ridiculous wrapping paper even. What he didn't remember was why he hadn't given it to Steve already. From the shadows and light seeping in through the glass, it must have been late afternoon... and the soldier wasn't home. Whatever fight they'd had last night must have been a real doozy.

Feeling anxious and inexplicably sore, Tony resigned himself to not having any answers. But when Steve got back, he was sure as hell going to have some serious explaining to do.


	6. Truth

**.**

**C6: Truth**

**.**

Walking the distance from Clint's small apartment in the lower East Side to the trademark tower just north of Times Square was admittedly, more difficult a task than Steve had anticipated.

Since emerging from an icy tomb three years ago he'd found there were certain things—things from his previous life, things he'd never had the chance to explore before—that just didn't affect him like they used to. Weather, things like hot and cold and wind and rain, had been some of those things.

Apparently teetering on the edge of unconsciousness was the exception, because he sure as hell felt the rain now.

Less than a mile into his trek the soldier found himself pausing for breath on FDR Drive, leaning heavily on the nearest wall and trying to look casual about it. Despite the raging storm the crowds had scarcely abated. Granted, they appeared now decked in more practical boots, coats, and umbrellas, but the untimely weather had no effect on the fact that rain or shine they had somewhere to be.

Steve watched them sluggishly, that familiar hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach urging him to remember that he had missed far more than the rise and fall of a few politicians during his long sleep. Somewhere along the way it seemed, the world at large had forgotten how beautiful their lives were. They had glazed over the little things in the name of success and turned away from one another in the name of self preservation. They moved on with their lives in a stream of overflowing schedules and deadlines and bills, and forgot while surviving that they were not living at all.

Sighing quietly, Steve swiped the rain out of his eyes for the umpteenth time and practiced standing upright without support. He swayed a little, but the biting chill of the rain and wind was actually working with him for the moment, dulling his body's overall ache and focusing the worst of his distress into a pulsating brand just beneath his ribs on the left side. He could deal with this, he knew. He'd dealt with worse.

Another half-a-mile passed before the soldier was forced to seriously consider his options. He'd already had to stop and ask for directions twice, earning him several worried and suspicious looks as the clerks hesitated to speak to a man clearly too mentally disturbed to know how to find the most prominent landmark in the city. The soldier didn't bother making excuses for his ignorance. It had been years since he had bothered to stammer and bluff his way through an awkward situation for the sake of saving face. He'd all but resigned himself to being the laughing stock of the modern world... as far as he was concerned, it didn't matter so long as someone ultimately gave him the damn directions.

Both of the the clerks he'd questioned had urged him to call a cab, remarking on the poor weather and the fact that the tower was nearly four miles away. He'd smiled and thanked them politely, apologizing for tracking puddles of water into their businesses before making his way back out into the rain.

He didn't bother pointing out that he would indeed love to call a cab, but his wallet was sitting in an old duffel bag on Tony's marble floor and all the money he carried was inside.

It just didn't seem worth the effort.

Eyes drifting downwards as he regained his breath, Steve caught sight of a rusted metal object lying in the abandoned flower beds at his feet. A glance up told him he was standing in front of what had probably once been a church, but was now a boarded-up box of a thing, its rotten wood sagging languidly under the weight of years. Holding his side carefully, Steve bent one knee and leaned down to pluck the item—a large, iron golf-club—out of the dead weeds. It was a rusted, heavy old thing, but if he held it by the head it served as a pretty decent makeshift cane.

Steve squinted up through the falling raindrops at the church, nodding once to he knew-not-who.

It took far too long—hours—to trek a distance that would have been an easy run back in his own time, but his new-found aid served to make the trip infinitely more bearable now that he had a way to take at least some of the strain off of his injury.

He reflected wryly on his boot camp days as he trudged the final two blocks to the familiar shining tower in the slowing drizzle, reminding him of long hours and miserable runs in heavier rain than this. He wondered if the army had changed in the last several decades as much as the rest of the world had. Perhaps they'd managed to retain some of the dedication, sacrifice, and patriotism that had first drawn him to their ranks all those years ago.

But he wasn't holding his breath.

The rain had slowed now to an odd misting patter, allowing the dark clouds overhead to part, the odd ray of sunlight breaking through to grace the city with its final hour of light. Even as dizzy and disoriented as he was after his surprisingly difficult trip, Steve found himself grateful for the picturesque beauty the light lent to his surroundings. If he'd stopped to think about it, he supposed some sentimental part of his old soul wanted to relate the breaking rays of light to he and Tony-to the conversation that lay ahead, which he had tried so hard not to think about and which consequentially had been the only think that possessed his thoughts.

Clint was waiting for him in front of Stark tower.

Exhausted and slightly out-of-breath, Steve blinked blankly at the man who stood in front of him, trying to figure out of Clint was really there or if Steve's wound had finally gotten the better of him.

"You walked all this way," the assassin remarked incredulously, shaking his head as he squinted up at the waning sun. "I was really hoping you'd come to your senses and turn around before you got here."

Steve stared. He was tired, bone and marrow. He couldn't phrase the questions he wanted to.

"You look like shit."

The soldier grinned, looking down and leaning heavily on his borrowed walking stick.

"Come on," Clint was at his side, prying the golf club out of his hands and taking its place under Steve's heavy arm.

Steve tried to jerk back; the assassin caught him before he could lose his balance completely.

"I'm going inside," he said stubbornly.

"I know," Clint looked disappointed, but resigned. "I'm not here to stop you. Just to keep an eye on you. I may not like this, but no way in hell am I letting you go in there alone."

Steve couldn't argue with that, so he reluctantly let Clint support him as they hobbled up the steps.

"So..." Steve gasped to hide the flaring pain in his ribs, "you were trying for the whole 'tough love' thing?"

"Yeah. Did it work?"

"Not really."

"Huh." Clint said nothing more.

The doorman gave both men strange looks as they staggered inside, thoroughly drenched and disheveled, but recognized Steve well enough and buzzed the elevator for them as they entered the foyer. They spoke very little as they waited for it to arrive, and finally stepped inside.

Steve was fairly certain that the elevator ride would be an equally quiet and awkward one—possibly fraught with further admonitions to give up this madness—but Clint really didn't seem intent on stopping him anymore. The archer tactfully moved Steve so that the soldier could lean against the wall opposite the door, and then simply let him have his space.

"What are you going to say?" Clint quietly voiced the question that had been plaguing Steve during the painful trek of the last forty blocks.

Steve swallowed, practicing moving his hand away from his side as he stared at the tiled elevator floor. "I have no idea."

Clint nodded. If he had any suggestions, he wisely kept his mouth shut.

Steve looked up at the small black screen that announced their current floor. As he watched, the number on display changed from seventeen to eighteen.

"I'll wait in here." Clint read the soldier's mind without trying, wordlessly offering to give the two lovers their space, though from the look on his face it was the last thing he wanted to do at the moment.

"Thank you." Steve couldn't look at the archer as he said it, eyes fixed unseeingly on the elevator doors.

The nineteenth floor sped by.

Clint stepped to the side as the elevator chimed, leaning against the wall near the control panel. Steve pretended not to feel the eyes boring into his skull, pretended not to feel the worry and uncertainty rolling off the assassin in waves.

The doors slid open, and Steve made a point of not looking back

"Finally," Tony was saying from the kitchen without turning around. He sounded mercifully sober. "I was wondering when you were going to show up. Boy, have I had a weird day..."

Steve adjusted the borrowed jacket around his abdomen, paranoid that Tony would be able to see through fabric and leather to the marks hiding beneath, and practiced his casual smile.

He was on his feet, Tony seemed sober, and Clint had not yet come storming through the doors with a blade drawn despite his promise to refrain from doing just that. So far, so good.

The elevator doors made a soft sound of compressed air as they closed behind him and the metal contraption dropped away, taking with it the steadfast presence that might have been all that was holding the soldier together. The absence left him feeling strangely cold, that old bone-gnawing chill creeping back into his limbs as a physical reminder of his weakness.

It hit him in full clarity, then. He had no idea what he was doing and no way in hell was he prepared for this.

Tony must have noticed that his boyfriend was being oddly quiet because he paused whatever he was doing to glance over his shoulder. He seemed casual enough at first, but he caught sight of the soldier's bruised features and oddly defeated posture and quickly did a double take.

"You look like shit."

Steve nodded and shrugged his concession as Tony unknowingly echoed Clint, but his mind was still frighteningly blank when it came to what, exactly he was going to say, and how, exactly, he was going to answer the questions that would inevitably come his way.

Unfortunately, his boyfriend's silence did not fool Tony. The brunette approached carefully, eyes narrowing as he took in the fading bruises, the unfamiliar clothes. He stood in front of the soldier for what seemed like an eternity, just studying him, as if he already knew Steve was hiding something more.

Steve pretended to miss the near-horror that slowly dawned over his lover's features, because he wasn't exactly ready to deal with the billionaire's reaction, and he _really_ should have thought this through a bit.

"Was this me?" Tony finally made a vague gesturing motion to Steve, his tone too loaded with meaning. There was something dark and unfamiliar in his voice, like he was dreading the answer more than anything.

Steve's resolve to be truthful crumbled. He'd shaped his life around protecting the man who stood in front of him now, looking at him like the answer to the one question could make or break him.

Sometimes, the best way to protect someone was with a lie.

"No," the soldier swallowed, "I got in a wreck."

"How's the bike?" Tony looked Steve right in the eye when he said it, and the super-soldier wavered. Tony was giving him the chance to call his own bluff.

Steve had always been a little too stubborn for his own good.

"It's fine," the words were clipped, signaling the end of the conversation, "unharmed, in fact."

"Good," Tony played along; nodded and forced a smile that wasn't meant to fool anyone. He turned and made his way up the short flight of steps to the kitchen.

Steve stood in place uncertainly, watching Tony in silence. There was no way the billionaire was buying the lie. The question that remained was simply how far he was going to push it.

"Why don't you go get washed up? Change?" Tony smiled tersely, dropping something metal into the sink. "I'm doing dinner tonight."

Steve didn't need to be offered the escape twice. He turned on his heel and retreated to the closest bathroom, locking the door carefully behind him. He sank down onto the toilet lid and unwillingly met his own eyes in the mirror.

"Too deep, Steve..." He muttered tiredly to himself, running a hand through his rumpled blond hair, wincing as he inadvertently pulled at a cut above his eyebrow.

He never should have come back, he realized. Not tonight, maybe not for a week or so... He should have waited for all physical signs of what had happened to disappear, fade into fist-sized smudges of color on his body and angry red scars that would eventually disappear altogether. Sure, Tony would have been pissed if he hadn't come home for that long but a pissed Tony was nothing new. That, he could deal with.

Depressed, guilty Tony? A little harder to handle.

The cold—all he really remembered from his first brief stint of consciousness the night before—was now back with a vengeance, seeping into flesh and bone and sapping his strength and resolve. As much as he hated the idea of needing any time to recuperate, he was fairly certain that a few days spent in bed would cure everything this time. How to pull off that kind of retreat without arousing Tony's suspicion was the truly challenging piece of this puzzle.

Steve glared at the man in the mirror, and hated himself for his own utter lack of answers.

"Captain America," he sighed, shaking his head, "you can stand down the Hulk and alien invasions and Nazi dictators... and you can't even face your own boyfriend."

**.**

Tony Stark was no idiot. Most of the world knew this, and were constantly reminded by grandiose expos, elaborate inventions, and aggressive advertising campaigns.

But somehow, the man who knew Tony the best tended to forget that little fact.

It certainly didn't take a genius to come to some basic conclusions about Steve based on their brief interaction of mere moments before, but Tony was a genius, so he came to those conclusions even quicker than usual. At least, this was how he explained it to himself. And anyone who asked, come to think of it.

The point was that all of those conclusions now pointed to the same painful fact: something was terribly, horribly wrong.

Tony pretended to be busy in the kitchen just long enough to watch Steve limp—and he hid it well—out of sight.

Dropping the spatula in his hand and all pretense of actually making anything, the billionaire strode purposefully down the steps and into the empty remains of the living room. Pressing his thumb to a nearly invisible mark in the marble, he pulled a thin console out of the wall and expanded it with a flick of his wrist.

"Jarvis," he mumbled quietly to his computer, "pull up security footage for last night from twelve P.M. to one... Elevator and lobby."

"Yes, sir."

"You know what..." Tony stroked his chin thoughtfully, his fingers quickly returning to the keys, "parking garage, too."

**.**

Steve took his time in the bathroom, splashing his bruised face with cold water and running his fingers through his hair, trying to shape the image in the mirror to fit the one he wanted Tony to see: a super-soldier who was healthy, confident, and put-together. It wasn't really working, if he were to be completely honest with himself. Instead he looked like he'd gone twelve rounds with the Hulk and had a wardrobe change somewhere in the middle.

A funny, queasy feeling grabbed hard at Steve's gut as he wondered what might happen if Tony realized that he was wearing Clint's clothes. Though honestly, that really should have been the least of his concerns at the moment.

The soldier pulled his fingers through his hair for the fifth time and sighed heavily into his hand, hating that he felt so nervous and sick facing his own boyfriend.

"The hell did you go wrong, Steve..." he asked himself, and predictably received no answer in the stillness.

For not the first time in the past twenty-four hours, he thought over the events of that disastrous night and tried to make sense of them; tried to understand that key moment at which he had made the fatal mistake. There was something—there _must_ have been something—that he could have done to change all of this.

Just like every other time he'd staged this internal monologue, he received no answer.

Knowing that if he stalled for time for much longer he would really start to lose it, Steve shook out his shoulders and headed for the door. He told himself that all he had to do was make it through a few minutes of idle conversation and compulsory smiles, and then he could beat a hasty retreat to the dark bedroom and a solid night's sleep.

At least that was one perk he could look forward to out of all this: he was exhausted enough that he wasn't likely to dream, a trick he'd learned on week-long missions with the Avengers. Stay tired, pass out, wake early. Rinse and repeat. Keep the mind racing to catch up with the body. It had worked so far and with any luck it would work tonight.

Keeping silent for reasons he couldn't even have explained to himself, Steve pressed down on the silver handle of the bathroom door.

Only to come face-to-face with the subject of all of his deepest fears. Tony was standing directly outside the door in the hall, his presence and sudden movement so entirely unexpected that Steve recoiled without meaning to.

"Yeah, see that?"

Tony's voice held the familiar note of satisfaction as he was proven right, but there was something _else_ there, too. Something horrible and dark and too knowing. And the sound of it wrenched at the soldier's gut.

Steve froze, mind going blank as every deflection and explanation fled his mind. It felt as though the air had been sucked straight out of his lungs.

"It wasn't your fault," he found himself saying, the words spilling carelessly from his lips, tumbling end over end because he couldn't hold them in any longer; couldn't lie.

"Cut the shit, Steve," the words lacked all of Tony's usual spark, "you do remember what century you're living in, right?" He paused, eyes accusing, before he admitted his source. "I saw the security feed from last night."

That was a variable Steve had never considered. Not that he had held any reasonable expectation of keeping up the ruse for long, but this was still a bit abrupt. He'd needed time, preparation...

"Tony—"

Stark's eyes slammed shut and he held up a finger, tension radiating from every limb. "_Don't_. Just, don't."

The billionaire turned sharply and moved away, halfway down the hall. Steve was half-convinced he would just leave altogether, but this time the brunette didn't go far. He paused, hands on his hips, and turned back to face Steve. He watched him, his expression painfully guarded and cautious.

Moments ticked by, Tony vibrating with tension; Steve frozen in fear. His heart was in his throat. He couldn't speak.

"Are you okay?" Tony asked at last. The words came out like they were physically painful to voice; like he was afraid to say them out loud for fear of the answer he might receive in return.

"I'm fine, Tony," Steve's own throat was closing up, and this was the last thing he needed and he really hadn't expected things to go this way.

"Really?" Tony didn't buy it, "cause you look like you're not."

Steve didn't really have an answer for that. He stood where he was, eyes fixed unseeingly on some point just beside Tony's arm. He wasn't sure why he felt so much like a youngster caught in a lie, but it wasn't a feeling he enjoyed in the least.

"I hurt you," it was a statement not a question, and as much as Steve wanted to deny it, he couldn't look Tony in the eye and say that it wasn't true.

"You didn't mean to," Steve pleaded, "it was an accident. These things happen."

"_No_," Tony approached quickly, jaw set, "no, these things don't happen. They—they _can't _happen_._"

At a loss for words, Steve caved in at last to the unbearable burning in his side and shifted his weight onto his right food in an attempt to ease the stress of standing.

Tony missed nothing, his eyes flickering downwards to take in the change, and quickly upward again. It took him no time at all to understand that Steve was injured past a few ugly bruises and rain-drenched clothes.

He stepped forward again; came so close that Steve could feel the warmth coming off his skin, smell his familiar scent. His hand lifted slowly and for a brief instant, Steve felt relieved at the thought of Tony touching him again. But the other man stopped, fingers hovering a centimeter from Steve's face.

His hand fell away, and he turned.

"Let's get you into something dry," The billionaire spoke quietly, words so soft that Steve had to strain to hear them.

"I'll go change," Steve suggested, but he was quickly overruled.

"Come on."

Swallowing, Steve silently followed Tony down the hall to the master bedroom.

It would be a lie to say that he wasn't worried. He'd never seen Tony like this and worse, he had no idea what was running through his boyfriend's mind. Tony was cryptic and complex at the best of times, and now he was a vault, his expression unreadable and his sentences carefully clipped.

This was bad.

Tony had already disappeared into his massive closet by the time Steve limped into the room, and the other man emerged a moment later with the appropriate garments—namely, a pair of dark blue pajama pants and a white t-shirt. He dropped the things onto the bed and approached the soldier, gesturing impatiently for him to lose his clothes.

Steve hesitated.

Tony's expression, as briefly as it came and vanished, nearly broke Steve's heart.

"I'm sorry," the soldier mumbled without knowing exactly what he was apologizing for. He gingerly began to remove the jacket, his heartbeat quickening.

It wasn't fear, he told himself. It wasn't nerves.

Tony didn't bother scolding Steve for his misplaced apology, another sure sign that the billionaire was now in full emotional lock-down. Instead he slipped around behind the soldier and smoothly slid the jacket from his arms, not blinking as the rain-bogged garment left a dripping trail of dirty water on his plush carpet.

_He would see_, was all that Steve could consciously think. He would see everything.

The super-soldier's vision was swimming by now, palms sweaty and heartbeat pounding in his ears. He managed to keep his reaction under control until the moment the other man's fingers slipped under the hem of his borrowed shirt, warm skin on cold.

"Tony," Steve had to stop him, his voice shaking.

Tony was standing in front of him in an instant, looking so damn pained that Steve regretted saying anything at all.

"Sorry—" the soldier began dumbly, feeling strangely light-headed because this was all so _wrong_, all so out of proportion and it was going to hurt them, he knew it was going to hurt them. This was going to break Tony. It was going to cut him deeper than any weapon, and last longer than any poison. It would leave their relationship in tatters. They might never recover. It wasn't supposed to be like this, he was supposed to be able to fix this.

By the time the soldier realized that he was drifting out of awareness, the lull of darkness was so tempting that he had to claw his way back with effort. He couldn't abandon Tony like that, couldn't scare him that way by letting go. Not yet.

"Shh, sh..." Tony was murmuring nonsensically somewhere just outside his fading range of hearing, both hands now clasping the soldier's face, forehead pressed to forehead. "It's okay. Alright? Just... hush."

Steve let his eyes flutter shut, concentrating on taking in shallow gulps of air as his chest heaved. He hated how much he needed to be away from Tony at that moment, while in the same breath his body relaxed into the billionaire's touch because it was everything he craved.

He couldn't fashion words. He couldn't string two thoughts together long enough to make a plan, to formulate a strategy to save their ship going down. His foundations were crumbling and his body was trying to shut down, and it was very displeased that he would not allow it do so. He had to stay here, and hold himself together long enough to make sure that Tony did the same. How to accomplish this was the more difficult task.

"Talk to me," Tony was murmuring in his ear, his hand rubbing absently at the back of Steve's neck. His voice was thick with concern. "You with me, kid?"

"I'm older than you," Steve coughed out, smiling brokenly at the familiar jab.

"Not where it counts," Tony seemed relieved to be able to return the old line, his warm breath ghosting across Steve's skin. "You gonna keep your feet, soldier?"

Steve nodded, certain now that the blackness had somewhat receded from his vision that he was in no imminent danger of passing out.

"Wanna try this again?"

"No," Steve shook his head miserably, and that actually drew a smile from Tony, as humorless as it was.

"Tough. Super-boy or not, you're going to make yourself sick if you stay all drenched and pathetic like a drowned cat."

Steve managed to catch Tony's wrist as he reached for the soldier's shirt again.

"Please, Tony," He pretended not to notice how weak his own voice was, or how faint tremors ran through his fingers, a hand that was usually so strong and sure. "You're going to be—"

"I deserve to be," Tony finished for him, his voice harsh. It held everything the soldier had dreaded hearing: Tony hadn't even seen the worst of the damage, and he already hated himself.

"Not your fault."

"Yeah. Well, I think I'll be the judge of that."

There was no arguing. Tony gently but firmly removed Steve's grip from his arm and tugged the soaking wet t-shirt up over the soldier's head. It joined the jacket, forgotten in a dismal mess on the floor. Steve was proud that he managed not to shiver as the cool air met damp, naked skin, but it reminded him all too keenly of the fact that nothing now stood between his mess of thick white bandages and Tony's line of sight.

Hyper-conscious of his boyfriend's gaze, the soldier found himself physically incapable of meeting Tony's eyes now, or even glancing at his features to determine his reaction to what he saw. Even he hadn't taken the time to examine the full extent of his own injuries; not without the comforting barrier of cloth to cover the worst of the wounds on his torso.

To Tony's credit it only took him a few beats to regain his composure after seeing the medley of bruises and bandages around the soldier's stomach, and then he was working the buttons of Steve's jeans with expert fingers.

Steve didn't look at Tony for the next few minutes as the billionaire gently, almost clinically stripped his boyfriend of his borrowed, water-logged clothing and helped him into the more familiar dry garments. Steve didn't miss the fact that Tony hadn't touched the bandages yet, though he was just as sure that his boyfriend hadn't forgotten about them either.

The silence stretched on for what felt like ages.

It was a long time—too long—before the soldier dared drag his eyes upward to gauge his lover's reaction to the sight of his battered body. He almost wished he hadn't. Tony's face was carefully blank, but the harsh line of his jaw and the dark, agonized shadow behind his eyes were all that was necessary to tell Steve how he felt.

"Sir," Jarvis announced before Steve could find the words to properly address the horrible, loaded silence between them, "you have a visitor in the elevator. Shall I admit him?"

"You, uh... you'd better get that," Steve nodded, smiling wryly as he was reminded of Clint's over-protective presence. He could only imagine what conclusions the archer would jump to if he wasn't able to reach Steve right away.

Tony frowned curiously, but at least the expression managed to erase, if only for a moment, some of that horrible guilt and anger that had been building behind his eyes.

Letting out a long, shaky breath of relief as he was granted a moment's respite from the intense scrutiny, Steve followed Tony back down the hall. He pretended that his slowed pace was intentional.

He followed Tony out into the entry just as the elevator doors opened.

"Barton," Tony greeted, if greeting it could be properly called. Steve could have chipped the ice off of his boyfriend's tone with a chisel if he'd had a mind to. "What do you want?"

"Oh, I just thought I'd drop in to make sure Steve was still alive," the assassin remarked darkly.

Clint invited himself into the room, his gaze drifting instantly to Steve. The blond didn't miss the way the archer's eyes narrowed, traveling up and down the soldier's body assessingly before relief softened the lines around his eyes.

"Well, he's with me," Tony sounded properly irritated by both Clint's presence and the clear implication of his words. "So if he's dead, we're both dead."

"Guys," Steve tried to interject, dreading the course this conversation was taking. Needless to say, his words had very little effect.

"Oh, I doubt that," Clint's voice was harsh, his words clipped.

"And what is that supposed to mean?"

"Clint, let's not do this—" Steve bodily moved in-between his lover and his best friend, and this turned out to be a terribly unwise move.

He wasn't sure who lunged first—Clint or Tony—but both men were angry enough to act on their impaired judgment before they realized that Steve stood between them. Somewhere in the ensuing tussle an unfortunately-placed elbow jabbed the soldier in the side with as much precision as if it had been an aimed shot, and that was the end of his attempt to hold himself together.

His breath caught and shadows flashed down over his vision so fast that he couldn't stop it, couldn't even try. He was falling, pitching downwards into darkness. Steve was vaguely aware of alarmed voices overhead, strong arms catching at him, halting his descent, lowering him gently downwards.

It was that note of panic in Tony's voice—so foreign and unfamiliar and _wrong—_that kept the super soldier from blacking out completely. He had never heard Tony so scared; should never have heard him sound like that. Because whatever happened Tony was the one they could count on to say logical and rational and smart, to remain detached and keep emotion from clouding the senses.

So when Tony sounded scared... well, it never boded well. For anyone.

Gasping, Steve blinked harshly as he fought his way up out of the pain, focusing on the blinking dots of color that eventually—slowly—reformed to reveal the familiar ceiling overhead and two concerned faces hovering above him. Just like last night, voices were fading and out, breaking through in garbled fragments and half-thoughts he could barely keep up with.

"—and shit like this happens," Clint was hissing angrily, Tony his clear target.

For once the billionaire didn't rise to the bait, too concerned about the semi-conscious super-soldier in his grasp to respond.

"Steve?" He questioned urgently, brows furrowed. "You with us?"

The soldier blinked, the sharp, spiking pain receding a little as his tense muscles slowly relaxed.

"I'm okay," he slurred unconvincingly, earning a half-relieved, half-disgusted snort from the dark pair of worried eyes hovering overhead.

Clint scoffed from somewhere to his right, letting out a lazy curse in a language Steve didn't recognize. Clearly, he wasn't buying it either.

Seemingly convinced the soldier wasn't about to keel over at least, Tony carefully assisted his boyfriend in sitting up against the wall, hovering like a frightened mother, though Steve never would have voiced the comparison aloud. It was a side of Tony he didn't see often and frankly, it unnerved him.

"Get out of my face, feathers," Tony snapped at the archer as Clint moved to assist him, "I've got it."

Glaring daggers at the billionaire, Clint did as instructed, backing away hesitantly. He clearly didn't feel completely comfortable leaving Steve alone with his boyfriend but he was going to have to accept it sooner or later, and he seemed to know it.

Half-awake and riddled in pain, Steve wasn't sure how much more of his two closest friends' complexities and hurt he could take at the moment. He just needed time... time to heal, to understand all of this... to sleep. He was sure that he could handle all of this in the morning.

"Let me help you get him to bed," Clint was saying, his reluctance to help Tony with anything clear, "he just needs to rest."

Steve silently thanked his best friend for being a mind-reader, and tried not to make it too difficult for either Clint or Tony as the two managed to work together just long enough to lug Steve's tall frame into the bedroom. As much as the soldier hated the coddling, accepting it as necessary for the moment seemed to be the easiest way to streamline his convalescence.

As soon as they'd managed to get the soldier stretched out on the too-large bed without making him pass out again, Tony went back to giving Clint the cold shoulder and Clint tried his damndest not to snap the billionaire's neck on the spot.

"Rogers..." The archer began, one hand twisted in the opposite sleeve. His eyes darted towards Tony, and he seemed to re-think whatever he'd been about to say.

"I'll be back first thing in the morning to check up on him," Clint addressed Tony instead, the threat in his voice only barely-veiled.

"I'll make sure to put a pot of coffee on," Tony bit back, faking a smile and not offering to show the archer out.

Clint spared a last long, lingering look at the super-soldier, his expression torn. A moment later he turned away and disappeared down the hall.

"Finally," Tony grumbled, tightening his steel grip on the soldier's hand. Showing unusual tact, he said nothing more. Instead he reached out gently to smooth the stray strands of blond hair from Steve's sweaty forehead, breathing out his tension and stress I a long, heavy whoosh of air.

"He... he'll get over it," Steve breathed tiredly, wishing that were the truth.

Tony smiled, but chose not to pursue the line of conversation.

"We've got a lot to talk about, Steve," the billionaire had the sound of a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, his eyes guarded and tired as he carefully adjusted the wrinkled covers around the soldier's body.

"Tony..." Steve mumbled in the beginnings of protest, his heart physically aching for his lover. He didn't want to leave Tony like this, but exhaustion was pulling at the corners of his mind, and the new waves of pain from a doubtless-reopened wound urged him to give in to it.

"In the morning," the billionaire revised firmly, sensing the soldier's need for blissful oblivion, "get some rest. I'll be here when you wake up."


	7. Bruises

**.**

**C7: Bruises**

**.**

Tony didn't sleep that night.

Instead he alternated between sitting in the shadowed bedroom, watching the rise and fall of Steve's chest as he slept, and pacing frantically in the empty living room.

He couldn't sit still, not for more than a few minutes at a time. His mind was buzzing, humming with nervous energy and bursting with more raw emotion than he'd ever felt in his life.

_You've lost him for good,_ was all that he could coherently think to himself, over and over again.

He'd really screwed it up this time, and no amount of denial would change that. He'd broken the fragile balance, tipped the scales in favor of disaster and he had no idea how to tip them back.

Hands clasped behind his head, the billionaire paced the cold tile anxiously, tipping his head back and trying to simply _breathe_. He grasped madly at the fraying edges of his sanity and pulled, desperate to hold himself together because regardless of all his sins Steve _needed_ him now.

Pausing abruptly, Tony couldn't resist padding down the hall to peek through the half-open door, to remind himself for the thousandth time that Steve was still breathing, still with him.

The soldier lay pale and still, exactly as Tony had left him. His chest moved softly as his body, deep in sleep, struggled to repair itself from the beating he had taken at the hands of the person who was supposed to protect him.

Feeling a cold, choking despair knotting up in his throat, Tony made it silently back to the living room before breaking down. He sank to his knees, back against the wall, and seized at his tousled hair with both hands.

_Breathe. _

He and Steve had fought before, they had hurt one another before. That was nothing new. But it had always been misplaced aggression and tempers they couldn't control; mutual strength feeding hostility and lust and childish anger. They'd beat the living shit out of each other for god's sake, and neither of them had blinked afterward. Because in the end they could both stand up and walk away from the mess. They were both _okay_, because despite whatever they pretended to be, they cared about each other.

This time... this time it was different. One of them almost hadn't walked away.

When had Steve stopped fighting, Tony wondered? There had been a point in retrospect when the soldier's flame had flickered out, and the fact that he couldn't place it was driving the billionaire up a wall. How could he have been so blind?

Steve didn't want to fight anymore, Tony knew. He didn't want to continue this destructive pattern of hostility and pain because it wasn't helping either of them. It was hurting them instead, damaging their hearts and minds and the tenuous fabric of whatever it was that existed between them, if it could be given a proper name at all.

Tony had been too blind to see any of this, or maybe he just hadn't wanted to see it. Change in Steve meant change in Tony and the billionaire hadn't been ready to change. Selfishly, he'd tried to hold on to what they had because it was simple, ironically. It was simple in that there was no emotion involved, or no emotion that mattered in any case. They gave each other what they needed, and so what if that sometimes meant a good fight? They were two of the very few people in the world who could stand toe to toe anyway. They shouldn't have had to feel guilty about wailing on one another when they needed to release a little pent-up energy.

But lately, it had been Tony releasing that energy, and Steve taking it bravely and quietly like he was made out of that goddamn vibranium like his shield; like he was fucking invincible.

Tony had let him. He'd stood there and watched it and let Steve waste away into something he barely recognized.

He'd made the mess. The problem was that now, he had no idea how to start cleaning it up.

Deep down, in a voice he dared not recognize, he silently wondered if that was even going to be possible anymore.

Desperate to quell his inner voice of doubt, Tony shot to his feet, stumbling into the kitchen. He stared blankly down at the forgotten remains of a half-prepared dinner, a cruel reminder of exactly how well the evening had _not_ gone. So maybe he'd had to call on the expertise of a few of his staff chefs to polish up his plans for the perfect dish of Rigatoni Siciliana, and maybe he'd had that bottle of 82' Chateau Petrus for years, just waiting the right moment to break the seal... but tonight had been the night.

He wasn't sure why he'd been so sure tonight would be different. Maybe it was the driving need in his gut to see Steve; to be close to him, to hold him. It was what had motivated him to keep the liquor in the cabinet and his fingers off the phone, though perhaps restraining himself from calling everyone he knew to hunt the soldier down had been the more difficult of the two resolutions.

Well, he'd been right about one thing... tonight really had been different.

Tony wasn't sure how long he stood there, staring blankly down at his spacious, empty living room, swept clean of the damning evidence of his crimes. But eventually the sky outside began to lighten, and soon rosy pinpricks of light were drifting through the dark clouds that still hung low on the horizon, and the polished floor was reflecting that light directly into his eyes.

The billionaire shifted, grimacing at the window and blinking the burn from his eyes. As if wakened from a dream he looked around, observing the discarded dishes and the telltale patches where the contractors had left the wall in a state of half-repair.

Walking like a zombie, barely in control of his own body, Tony found himself moving. He crossed the large kitchen and pulled open the doors to his liquor cabinet. A bottle of Black Pearl was in his hands, and he'd be damned if he remembered reaching for it.

His hand was shaking.

Drawing in a shuddering, bracing breath, Tony quickly shoved the bottle of cognac back into the cabinet and shut the doors. He paused there a moment, running a hand over his face, blinking away the fog that had descended over his mind and with it, the too-urgent need for a strong drink.

The billionaire made another trip back down the hall, peeking in through the door to assure himself that Steve was still fine, still _there_ and alive and whole. At that moment, Tony wanted nothing more than to shake the soldier awake; tell him to cowboy up and shake it off because _goddammit it_ he was Captain Freaking America, and he didn't go down that easy.

But he couldn't do that. Not while this was all so horribly, obviously his fault. He could let Steve sleep, even if the sight of the solider deep in peaceful, soundless slumber was about as foreign a sight as Thor in a dress. At least while the soldier was asleep he wouldn't feel any pain, a luxury his serum-enhanced body was not afforded in waking.

Grinding his teeth, Tony forced himself to turn away from the door and shuffled back into the empty living room. His watch told him that it was not yet seven, but he couldn't stand the silence any longer.

His desk agent picked up the phone on the third ring, sounding exhausted. Tony experienced a momentary flash of sympathy, knowing the poor woman must have been called in hours earlier than usual to deal with the fallout of the last structural disaster to mysteriously befall Stark Tower.

"Hey, Jules," Tony blinked the exhaustion out of his eyes, sighing, "how's the cleanup going?"

"As well as might be expected, Mr. Stark," the woman's voice held the familiar tones of resignation and long-suffering, both traits that seemed to have become prerequisites for long-time Stark Industries employees.

"Yeah, great, great," Tony planted a hand on his hip and rotated to survey his now-empty suite, "so... I'm going to need some new furniture."

**.**

It was noon.

An entire crew of Pepper-approved movers had been in and out with almost a dozen loads of furniture after being informed in no uncertain terms that if they made the slightest bit of noise they would be forfeiting not only their own careers, but that of their children and their children's children. The new living room had been arranged and re-arranged, and as it turned out the new theme was neither retro nor French but almost an exact replica of the modern lines and Italian leather that had been there before.

And Steve still wasn't awake.

Clint had stopped by twice already, and had only restrained himself from making a scene after being reminded that doing so could wake Steve up, a concept that apparently was one of the few things that could move either man to practice tact.

Despite all his best intentions however, Tony was reaching the end of his rope. So maybe it had been a very short rope to begin with, but if he didn't hear Steve's voice soon, look into those breathtaking baby blues... well, he might just explode.

So it was with great trepidation that the billionaire padded quietly into the bedroom, dropping into a crouch beside the large bed and studying the sleeping soldier with as much detachment as he could muster. It wasn't much.

"Steve?" Tony tried weakly, nursing the slim hope that the quiet words might be enough to shake the soldier out of his deep slumber.

No such luck.

"Hey, soldier," the billionaire tried with a little more of his usual gusto and flippancy, placing one hand on the mattress—even if he hadn't quite worked up the guts to touch his lover yet. "Rise and shine. Daylight's a wasting."

Steve remained quite unresponsive, his head canted slightly towards Tony, lips open just a sliver as he breathed. Even covered in bruises and bandages, the blonde looked like a fucking angel to Tony. And Tony felt that he deserved him about as much.

Resigning himself to doing this the painful way, the billionaire swallowed hard and carefully slipped his hand into Steve's limp fingers, squeezing. With his other hand he gripped the soldier's shoulder, shaking him gently.

"Steve. If you don't want me to panic and start making your funeral arrangements, you might want to think about waking up now."

Apparently that did the trick, or maybe it was the touch or a combination of both. In moments, Steve's striking blue eyes were blinking slowly at him, the soldier still half-aware in the grip of sleep.

"Tony?" He rasped, frowning a little. The confusion was clear in the hazy eyes and bewildered frown.

Tony resisted the urge to sigh. This was exactly what he hadn't wanted to deal with; the confusion and recounted sins. His life would be so much easier if Steve could just remember everything that had happened on his own, because Tony didn't think he could stomach speaking the words himself. It didn't help that aside from a few security clips showing Steve in the lobby and elevator that night, he really didn't have a perfect idea of what _had_ happened.

Well... that, and Pepper making an angry stop-in to brief him on what kind of legal backlash he could expect for the damage he'd caused to the streets and adjoining buildings. He'd been confused as to how exactly this had happened, but not particularly worried about it. Although it came with a hefty price tag there were few things that wouldn't go away when you waved the right lawyers at them.

"Yeah, it's me," Tony answered carefully, making his best attempt not to look too rattled or worried. "You've been out for a while. I thought it was long past time to check on your battle scars."

Steve nodded, but that slight frown didn't go away, like he was still trying to piece together where he was and what had happened to put him there. The disorientation wasn't good, but hopefully once the soldier got moving and pulled himself together that would go away too.

"Come on," Tony urged, "let's get you up. Try not to bleed all over my sheets. They're imported Egyptian cotton."

Tony was rewarded for his efforts when the barest ghost of a smile passed over Steve's lips as the billionaire fussed over something as inconsequential as the sheets, but he still noticed that the expression quickly vanished as they made the joint effort of getting the soldier into a sitting position. Tony waited patiently for his boyfriend's harsh breathing to even out a little before they took the next step—standing up.

The brunette found himself supporting most of Steve's weight for a moment as the soldier's already-pale skin turned an alarming shade of gray, but mercifully Steve didn't pass out. Tony really hadn't thought that far ahead, but he was pretty certain he wouldn't have been able to catch Steve if he'd conked out—not without hurting one or both of them further anyway.

The trip to the living room was difficult—probably for Steve, as every step pulled at an injury he never should have had in the first place, but certainly for Tony. Every time Steve stiffened in pain or made a soft noise of distress Tony felt like crawling into a hole somewhere to die. He'd never felt so much like an asshole, and he tended to be an asshole quite a bit. He usually didn't regret it.

This time regret wasn't a strong enough word for what he felt.

"There you go, buddy," Tony soothed, more for his own sake than Steve's as he eased the soldier down to sit on the new couch. "What do you think of the new décor, huh?"

Steve was still pale as a ghost, but he made a valiant effort of looking around the room. "Looks like the old décor..." he muttered, wincing as he pressed his hand gingerly to his stomach.

Tony tsked and quickly moved the hand away, "knock it off. You want to hurt yourself more?"

Steve nodded and grinned, "I don't think that's possible."

He must have noticed the stricken look on Tony's face, because he quickly realized how that had sounded. "Tony, I didn't—"

"So these little bottles," Tony cleared his throat and firmly cut the solider off, his heart aching. He wasn't ready for that conversation quite yet, not on his current low levels of sleep and alcohol. "What are they for, again?" He picked up one of the two small, plain-looking prescription bottles Clint had left on his counter-top.

Steve shrugged carefully, "I have no clue. Pretty sure they're not for the pain, though."

Again, Tony plied a considerable amount of willpower to pretending that comment didn't dig at his heart like a dagger in an open wound. The billionaire popped open one of the lids, grimacing at the white cream inside. Close inspection proved that it didn't actually smell like anything, so he assumed it was for dressing Steve's cuts.

"Okay, let's give this a shot. I'm no doctor, but I'm thinking this shouldn't be too difficult."

Steve gave his boyfriend a wary look, "are you sure? Maybe we could... just call Bruce."

Tony blinked, "Banner?"

"Yeah. He patched me up... yesterday, maybe?"

Tony shook his head, rubbing his jaw absently, "you would be surprised to find out how many questions that answers for me."

"What?"

"Never mind. Come on, quit stalling and strip."

The half-hearted joke fell horribly flat, and again Tony was compelled to go to Steve's rescue when removing his shirt proved too arduous a task for his damaged abdomen muscles to handle. Through combined efforts—Steve's clumsy with exhaustion and pain, Tony's cold and professional—they managed to remove the offending garment and get the soldier flat on his back on the couch.

Tony managed to bravely detach himself once again from the black-and-blue mess that was Steve's skin, primarily because he'd promised himself that he would save the mental breakdowns for moments when Steve was all taken care of and preferably, nowhere nearby.

Detaching himself from the sight of the gaping wound in Steve's stomach was another matter, because the mess had been covered over last night and Tony hadn't seen it; hadn't known it would be this bad.

He was tempted to ask exactly how it had happened as he stifled his churning nausea and bravely gathered up the bloody bandages. The words were on the tip of his tongue when he abruptly realized that maybe he didn't really want to know, and he turned his full attention back to his task before he made himself sick with guilt. Well... more sick than he already was.

By the time he was done with what he hoped was a decent job of cleaning and dressing the torn flesh, all angry red skin and dried blood and ugly black stitches, Tony was definitely feeling more than a little sick. The only thing that get him from bolting for the bathroom was Steve, because the soldier had been deathly quiet throughout the whole ordeal but his eyes were screwed shut and sometimes in the silence Tony could hear his teeth grinding together. The billionaire didn't feel strong enough to scold him for that, but when he was finished he reached out carefully, trying to smooth out the angry lines of the soldier's forehead, skin scrunched in quiet pain.

"Still with me?" Tony breathed, his voice barely louder than a whisper.

Steve said nothing, but one hand fumbled upwards to find Tony's wrist and squeeze, hard. It was answer enough.

"Sh..." Tony murmured, linking his fingers into the soldier's and reaching a gentle hand for the tousled blond hair. He wasn't sure when he'd become so fascinated with it, but all he could think of was how much Steve hated it when it was messy, and how seeing it wild and out of place like this was just wrong, unnatural.

The billionaire hesitated when his hand encountered an unnatural heat, his heart quickening in fear as he pressed his palm to the soldier's forehead.

"You feeling warm?" He asked, dreading the answer.

"No," the word seemed to cost Steve a lot of effort, and he breathed out heavily as he settled against Tony's hand, his words slurred with exhaustion, "s'cold."

Tony swallowed, licking his dry lips and nodding. "Okay, okay... I'll see what I can do. You alright here?"

"Mm," was the only response. Steve seemed half-asleep again, and Tony didn't have the heart to keep him awake.

The billionaire eased his hand out of Steve's, hating the loss of contact, and quickly returned to the bedroom for a blanket.

"Jarvis, adjust the thermostat," he instructed his computer as he forwent hunting for a throw and simply yanked the top blanket off the mattress, "five degrees warmer."

"Sir."

By the time Tony made it back to the couch, Steve was dead asleep once more. The billionaire was relieved to feel the warmer air kicking on, but he still wrapped the soldier carefully in the blanket, wishing there was more he could do to ease his boyfriend's recovery... a recovery that was bound to be twice as complicated if he had a fever.

Unable to repress his churning nerves for another moment, Tony made sure that the soldier was comfortable and beat a hasty retreat to his bathroom.

Since Steve had returned to him less than twenty-four hours ago looking like death warmed over and sporting injuries that should have stopped a normal man's heart, Tony had spent a lot of time hiding in his guest bathroom, pacing the cold tile and trying to keep his emotional breakdown as silent as possible so Steve could get some rest.

This time, he didn't need to pace. Instead he stood in front of the mirror and braced his palms on the counter, pressing his forehead against the cool marble and sucking in air through his nose until he thought his lungs might be ready to burst. He finally straightened and released it in a long, cleansing rush that fogged the mirror in front of him.

He wasn't sure how long he stood there. It could have been hours, because he was painfully aware of his own chronic inability to control his raging guilt and anger and shit like that tended to eat you up, heart and soul, and spit you out on the wrong end of a decade before you made an inch of progress sorting yourself out. And considering the fact that Tony Stark had never before in his life been faced with a solid reason for changing who he was, his prospects were looking more hopeless by the moment.

One thing was certain... something had to change. Not for him, but for Steve. For the both of them.

He was fully, painfully aware of what he'd done. He'd taken the one true and pure and beautiful thing that existed in his life and he'd crumpled it up and tossed it away. By some sheer stroke of beautiful, undeserved luck it had come blowing back to him in a stiff breeze, but the horrible truth remained that it might blow away again before he had time to blink.

_Fix this, Tony. Goddamn it, **do something**._

Though he'd intended to remain right where he was for as long as it took to stuff his nerves back into the darkest corners of his heart; to figure out ways that he could be helpful to himself instead of freaking out like a teenager who'd just been caught by the cops, he wasn't allowed the time.

He didn't even remember stuffing his phone into his front pocket but he must have put it there at some point, because when it went off he jumped about a foot in the air.

Recovering, he fumbled hastily for the device, nearly dropping it in his attempt to answer the damn thing before it could continue ringing. Even though Steve was a room away Tony was still paranoid that the slightest noise would be enough to wake him up and cause some sort of irreparable setback to his recovery.

"What?" He snapped unnecessarily into the phone, wishing he'd taken the time to check the caller ID before answering.

"Good morning to you, too," came the unwelcome and all-too-familiar voice. Tony rolled his eyes toward the ceiling and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Oh, yipee. I just won the phone-call lottery. What do you want, Fury?"

"I think you have a pretty good idea."

"Ah, let me guess. We're having a costume party aboard the Hindenberg Mach II and I'm the guest of honor."

"You always were the smart one."

"Fury, this is the worst possible time—"

"The Earth is in danger, Stark," the cold voice cut through reason and protest. "Sorry if that doesn't exactly mesh with your social calender but alien invasions tend to get a little inconvenient sometimes. Get your ass to the Hellicarrier by eight A.M., sharp. Drag your little soldier along with you."

And with that, Fury was gone, the line buzzing dead in his ear.

Tony swore under his breath and slapped the phone down on the marble sink, clenching his jaw and taking a moment to suppress his flaring temper. He should have known that Fury wouldn't cater to their personal issues; the man had all the sympathy of a rabid dog.

The problem was that this time it was Steve and not Tony who would be paying the price for the poor timing. The super-soldier was still nursing a hole in his abdomen the size of his fist, for chrissake. Now Tony was going to have to go tell him to be a big boy and suit up?

Tony had spent a great deal of time since joining the Avengers imagining creative ways to give Nick Fury the proverbial middle finger, and never had he been as tempted to do so as he was at that particular moment. With no more than a few swift keystrokes and a command or two to Jarvis he could have Fury's flying deathtrap falling out of that air at a moment's notice. The only thing that stopped him was the thought of how inconvenient that would be for a whole lot of other people Tony didn't necessarily hate.

Tony shook out his shoulders and reached for his cellphone, returning it to his front pocket with considerable more gentleness than he had shown it a moment ago. Letting out a sigh of frustration, he turned to the door and braced himself to give Steve the bad news.

Back in the living room, bathed in the dim gray half-light seeping through from the storm outside, the soldier was now slumped sideways on the couch, his face pressed carelessly into the stack of pillows resting on the arm. His small black cell-phone still sat forgotten near his outstretched fingers, lax in sleep. He must have gone to get it while Tony was freaking out behind closed doors.

The billionaire made a point of not touching the cellphone, because he had a pretty good idea who Steve had been talking to, and he didn't need to put himself through that particular gauntlet quite yet. Better to let sleeping dogs lie for the time being, as much as he hated it.

Instead, Tony took a seat on the coffee table directly across from the slumbering man and leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees.

For one of the few times in his hectic, fast-paced life, Tony Stark took the time to simply be still and watch his boyfriend sleep.

The soldier looked so damn young when he was unconscious, which was one of the primary reasons that Tony made a point of _not_ watching him like this when he was sleeping. Something in him always stirred in protective sympathy; sparked in unwanted passion. With the soldier, always so serious and mature, laid bare before him in sleep... he truly understood who this man was. He was a boy who wore the flag on his chest, a child ready and willing to put his heart and soul and life on the line for the country he loved. Here was a man who did nothing halfway. Who loved fully and hurt deeply and cared too damn much about everyone around him, even people he'd never met.

A man, a warrior, a soldier, a friend...

And yet, Steve had been twenty years old when he'd entered into the Super Soldier program, and had spent less than four years since then conscious. Something in Tony felt _wrong_ acknowledging the realistic difference between them. Here was a man who could have almost been his son, or at best little brother, and yet who had been born nearly a hundred years before him.

Worst of all, worse than the age difference, worse than the culture-shock; the personality clashes... was the fact that Steve, despite all that he had done and seen, all that he had been through in the name of patriotism and service... was truly innocent.

He believed the best in people, he stood for truth and freedom. He fought for his own idealistic faith in human kind and would willingly die to protect that faith. He was all that his country needed him to be and more. So much more.

He was everything a goddamn hero was meant to be, and for what? To throw it all away on someone like Tony Stark?

Tony looked away, feeling slightly nauseous. What right did he have to Captain America? To the best and purest thing a crumbling nation had to offer in it's own defense? If he had a selfless bone in him he never would have looked sideways at Captain Steve Rogers. He never would have dragged him down like this.

As if somehow privy to his boyfriend's dark thoughts, Steve stirred slightly in slumber, his soft blonde eyelashes fluttering softly, brows creasing in worry.

Tony hesitated, and reached across the gap between them. His fingers gently brushed a strand of hair away, grazing warm skin. Even in sleep, the soldier seemed hyper-conscious of Tony's presence and his head fell forward against the touch. The motion seemed to be painful, because the relaxed body stiffened for a moment.

Feeling guilty for disturbing the other man, even if he hadn't actually woken him up, the billionaire glanced downwards towards the cloth he knew hid thick white bandages. His stomach clenched painfully at the thought of what hid beneath... a twisted, bloody wound for which Tony could take every bit of credit without contest.

Tony drew his hand back and clenched his fist until he could feel his muscles screaming in protest, his joints grinding together.

Stark didn't believe in moments of enlightenment, or revelations from above with choirs of angels singing as a man became a better person in a moment of glorious spiritual metamorphosis.

But even he, in all his acerbic wit and sacrilegious sarcasm, had to admit that there existed flickering snatches of light in existence, a sliver of time during which the clouds parted and a ray of truth struck like a bolt of lightening and changed everything about a man. Those moments were real. Maybe he didn't have a name for them or much faith in their power, but he knew when he felt them.

He knew something had changed. Because the Tony of yesterday was the kind of self-centered ass he would have been ashamed to know, and maybe that was still mostly true... but _something_ was different, and maybe it had taken his lover and best friend limping back through his doors, wielding the marks of war inflicted by his own lover, but the sight—the knowledge—struck Tony, heart and soul.

He knew now what he had not known before, or maybe had known but just avoided admitting.

What Tony now knew beyond a shadow of the doubt was that he would do anything—say anything, give anything, sacrifice anything—for Steve, for this man who called himself Captain America, and saved nations, and woke up screaming at night when no-one was listening. Tony would do anything for him; walk through hell and back with a smile on his face. And maybe he didn't have the guts to put a name to that, but he sure as hell had the guts to back it up.

Whatever it took... he would never let something like this happen again.


	8. Distance

**.**

**C8: Distance**

**.**

Steve gripped the heavy plastic armrests, pressed himself back into his seat, and worked very hard on _not_ heaving his guts up all over Tony's private jet.

Hyper-aware of the sheen of moisture coating his neck and palms, he dared a sideways glance across the aisle at his boyfriend. Aside from a few terse questions (Are you okay? Need anything?) the billionaire had been eerily silent for most of the flight.

Take now, for instance.

Tony sat, impeccably dressed as always, stiff-backed and close-lipped in a seat that was noticeably as far from Steve as he could get. His shaded eyes were fixed firmly out the windows—_still just clouds out there, Tony_—and he hadn't so much as glanced sideways at Steve in nearly an hour.

For the moment, this was a good thing, of course… no need to work the man up any more by looking seconds away from heaving all over the Italian leather. On the other hand it was so out of character that it was beginning to seriously worry the soldier. Snatches of memory from the last two days were hard to conjure, but he was certain Tony had been _there_, been present in every sense of the word. He'd been speaking and worrying and fussing and simply being Tony… but a switch had been flipped somewhere in the night, sometime between hauling Steve back to bed and giving him the news that they would be catapulted back into chaos by noon tomorrow.

Something had changed.

Now Tony was sealed off, so far removed from the soldier that he might as well have been on another planet. He was making every possible effort to avoid physical contact with his boyfriend, and had managed to cut himself off verbally and emotionally almost entirely.

Steve, confident for the moment that Tony would not look his way and see his moment of weakness, allowed his eyes to flutter shut. Mostly thanks to the billionaire's pointedly misdirected field of attention, Steve had managed to keep the fact that he was now running a fever from landing him babysitting duty for the tower. Tony had been noticeably irritated with Fury when he'd informed Steve that they had an assignment, and had made a few half-hearted threats to leave the soldier in New York if he wanted.

Steve wanted.

Captain America, however, didn't have that luxury.

Early that morning, in a conversation that Tony had no doubt been expecting to conduct outside the soldier's range of hearing, the billionaire had carried on a very heated exchange over the phone. Steve, having dressed himself with minimal pain for once, had stood quietly in the hallway and tried not to feel guilty for listening in. It didn't take long for the soldier to decipher Barton's presence on the other end of the line, and only another beat for him to be thoroughly impressed that the billionaire and the assassin seemed to be agreeing on something—even if that something was the fact that the soldier had no place and no right to be charging into an Avengers operation short half his blood.

Steve had waited for Tony to slap the phone down, swearing profusely, before the soldier sauntered out into the living room like he was perfectly fine and more than ready to defend his country, thank you very much.

At least, he tried to look that way. The bruises, fading ugly and dark on his cheekbones, and the noticeable limp dogging his steps probably weren't helping much.

Tony set his jaw, glared daggers at the solider in what was clearly misplaced aggression, and demanded to know if he was actually going to go through with this madness.

"Can you do this? Don't you fucking lie to me, Steve."

Steve smiled big around clammy, fever-hot skin and shadowed eyes, and replied without blinking.

"The world needs us. I'm going."

Thinking back, that remark had been the moment when Tony had really shut down, sucking back into his self-made shell quicker than the soldier could blink. It was as if he'd heard exactly what he'd expected to hear and hadn't wanted to hear, and it had been the final straw. Like a brick wall slamming up between them, Tony had pulled away.

Now, Steve couldn't tear his eyes off of Tony's strong profile, and he couldn't tear his mind off the fear that maybe, finally, the billionaire was getting sick of him.

A soft chime from somewhere overhead came as a signal from Tony's private pilot that they were approaching their destination and if this had been a commercial charter, some soothing voice might have come over the speakers to tell them they ought to buckle up. Apparently, owning your own airline exempted one from such arbitrary rules as wearing a seatbelt.

Steve reached down with unsteady hands and firmly clicked his belt into place anyway.

As the craft shifted and tilted downwards, Steve slammed his eyes shut and found another reason to be thankful that Tony wasn't paying any attention to him. The billionaire never got tired of heckling the soldier for his unease in (and distrust of) aircraft, an anxiety Steve was usually able to diffuse or disguise entirely by staying quiet. Granted, he might be a little snappish if someone tried to make conversation with him during a rough descent, but for the most part, the team looked the other way and made no comment.

All except for Tony. And at that particular moment, Steve almost longed to hear his voice, even if it was mocking him for one his oldest and deepest-rooted fears.

As usual, they survived the landing, and because they were in a multi-million dollar craft piloted by the worlds finest, it was actually an astonishingly smooth one. That didn't stop Steve from releasing a long breath of relief as he unclenched his white-knuckled grip from the arms of his seat and grimacing regretfully at the finger-shaped marks he'd left in the metal and plastic.

The second the doors were down, Clint was shouldering his way into the jet, his eyes seeking out Steve at once. The tenseness in his face was flooded by relief, and Steve just found himself happy to see someone who was happy to see _him_.

Tony, on the other hand, bolted off the aircraft like he had a race to run, leaving Steve blinking dumbly after him, his heart sinking further into irrational fear. The billionaire brushed by Clint without a word, his expression still so guarded and closed that it was impossible to even read the usual animosity he would have shown for the assassin's presence.

"I don't understand," Steve found the words falling out as Clint approached his side, tumbling out from between his lips before he had time to stop them, his verbal filter clearly impeded by exhaustion.

Something in Clint's face revealed understanding, and he simply shook his head. "I've got nothing, Steve."

It certainly sounded like maybe he _did_ have something, but it wasn't very likely to be anything the soldier wanted or needed to hear.

Steve didn't bother answering, and pretended to be humoring Clint with his cooperation as he allowed the assassin to support him up from his seat. Honestly, having a way to take even some of the horrible pressure off his side was relieving enough to draw a long sigh from his lips.

Clint said nothing more as he surreptitiously aided Steve off the plane, helpfully making small talk as they entered the Hellicarrier to avoid starting unwanted conversation with passing agents and crew members.

As Steve nodded and quietly focused on putting one foot in front of the other, he thanked God for the thousandth time for dropping someone like Clint into his life. Though it was a sentiment he'd never voiced, he found himself drawing constant parallels between Clint and Bucky, the only other person who'd known him well enough to read his mind before Steve knew what he was thinking himself. Bucky, who'd owed him nothing, but had still been there for him every step of the way. Heck, if not for him… Steve might not even have made it through High School. He certainly wouldn't have made it far in the Army—not as a soldier, anyway.

"What are you grinning about?" Clint sounded suspicious in his ear, bringing the soldier abruptly back to the present.

"Not a thing," Steve lied, easing his weight slowly away from his friend as he tested out his own limbs. Thankfully, he found them fairly cooperative, if agonizingly sore, after a few days of rest.

Clint let the obvious slide. "Have you decided what you're going to tell the others?" His voice held reluctance and disapproval as he eyed his friend critically, and the soldier couldn't blame him for either sentiment.

"No," Steve answered, quietly, honestly.

Neither of them saw the need to say anything more on the subject, because Clint had questions and Steve didn't have answers and what was the point of wasting their breath? Yet another reason Steve loved having Clint around... the assassin chose his hills to die on very, very carefully.

"Hey," Clint caught at Steve's sleeve before the soldier could head up to the command deck to meet with Fury, "look, about the other day—"

Steve's heart sank, and he quickly held up a hand to silence the assassin, "please don't."

"That's not what I meant." the assassin nodded his head in concession, "I was just—you know. I shouldn't have made you walk."

Steve blinked at his friend, "please tell me you haven't been feeling guilty about that for two days..."

"Of course I have," and Clint was able to grin this time because the words were enough. He knew Steve didn't hold him against it even before the soldier said it.

"Well, don't," Steve grinned back, clapping Clint on the shoulder with about half his usual gusto, "I think I needed the exercise."

Fury took a quick look at the soldier when he walked onto the deck, and immediately did a double-take.

"The hell did you do to yourself, Rogers? And do I want to hear about it?"

"No, sir," Steve replied without hesitation, "I'm almost certain that you don't."

Fury turned away and swore in disgust, taking a moment before he rounded on the super-soldier once more. "You get your ass in shape, soldier. Whatever you do on your own time damn well better not compromise this mission, you hear me?"

Steve managed to remain surprisingly serene after that statement. "Yes, sir."

"Get off my deck," Fury waved him away and headed off down the catwalk.

Steve didn't need to be asked twice.

**.**

Bruce and Thor hadn't arrived yet, so the early-morning debriefing was grudgingly delayed until they could "grace us with their sorry-ass presence," as Fury so eloquently phrased it.

This was fine with Steve, or he thought it was until he realized that it simply gave him more time to brood and worry about the fact that his ever-talkative boyfriend could no longer meet his eyes or share a word with him. That alone was alarming enough to send him running from his assigned quarters (empty) and meandering hopefully back to the observation deck (also empty) on the top floor where he and Clint had once spent so much time together.

It was silent and still, and he really shouldn't have been surprised because despite his stoic presence and helpfulness it kind of seemed like Clint was avoiding him, too.

The soldier sat back on one of the black steel benches, looked down on the clouds, and allowed himself to ache.

How long had it been since Tony had touched him, he tried to recall? How long since it hadn't been borne of sheer lust or anger? A gentle hand, a brush of skin… something Steve had never known in another life was all he missed in this one. Some days, he was sure it would kill him.

Dropping his chin to his chest, the soldier crossed his arms and rubbed at his biceps, trying to infuse some warmth back into his chilled limbs. Ever since that night—the night all of this had gone so horribly wrong—he'd felt perpetually cold, like there was no light in the world. And maybe this misery was part of what was contributing to his need for human contact, his soul-deep yearning for a kind touch, but it was eating him up and it was one of the most exhausting sensations he'd ever felt.

Honestly, secretly, in the deepest part of himself, Steve just wanted to be able to go to his boyfriend and let the billionaire wrap him up in accepting arms, and just hurt and breathe and _be_... He longed for the warmth of acceptance, physical and emotional, and the comforting pull of true affection. Damn it all, he wanted to know with all certainty that one person on the planet loved him. Admitting that, even in thought, was painful. The prideful part of him didn't like the idea of needing anyone like that.

Maybe the part of him that was still the loyal soldier balked at the concept of commitment to anything other than a flag and an ideal and a nation, because love wasn't sacrifice; wasn't for the greater good. It was an ugly, selfish, brutal little thing that rooted into your soul and rotted you up, but like a virus, it was there to stay. There to hurt.

And cruelest of all it was vital to survival. Humankind needed it like air, chased it and fought over it like savage creatures. And more than anything, Steve Rogers wanted it, too.

But it was a wish. A dream, a fleeting breath of a memory that never was, because they were Avengers... they were Iron Man and Captain America and they didn't work like that, and never had. Maybe they never would.

Steve bravely restrained himself from jumping out of his skin when familiar fabric brushed over his shoulders and settled there, heavy and warm. He blinked up at a small figure, and it took him a beat too long to recognize her.

"Natasha."

She offered a smile of greeting, an expression that held no mirth at all but was so distinctly _hers_ that Steve had to smile back.

"Thanks..." he pulled absently at his own coat, wondering how she'd even known he would need it. "How—how've you been?"

It was a lame start and they both knew it, but she took a seat beside him anyway. He knew she wasn't one for invasion of personal space, but she still made sure to sit close enough that her shoulder pressed against his. In his warmth-starved state, he hated how comforted that made him feel.

"Things are good," she allowed the cop-out greeting and returned vaguely, bright eyes perusing the deck as if she were looking for something there, "same as ever, really."

Steve nodded, pulled tighter at the jacket, and tried not to shiver too loudly.

"Clint told me," she answered his unasked question after a beat of stillness, and there was something dark and strangely unidentifiable in her tone.

Steve sighed, but he couldn't blame the assassin. Clint and Nat had a way with each other that the others didn't question. "Did he ask you to come babysit me?"

Natasha laughed, and the sound was beautiful. "I don't babysit. Don't sell yourself short, Cap. We all care about you, you know."

Something about that statement, so open and honest and plain, like it was the truest thing in the world and he should have known it already—it pulled tight at an angry wound, and Steve swallowed hard.

"Thanks," he managed stupidly, and he knew she was smiling still. She loved making him squirm, and was shockingly good at it. Or perhaps, given her reputation, not so shockingly.

"May I?"

Steve turned his eyes upwards to find the assassin standing in front of him now, gesturing to his coat. He wasn't quite sure what she was asking permission for, but he nodded anyway.

Crouching deftly, the redhead pushed Steve gently backwards to sit at an angle against the bench and moved aside the fabric of his shirt, gaining a plain view of the thick bandages hiding underneath. Steve swallowed hard and looked away, bracing himself for the pain that always came with the process of examination.

Surprisingly, he barely felt her touch as the redhead clinically examined the inflamed skin and set the cloth back as she'd found it.

"Amateur job," she scolded, and he could hear amusement and bitterness and anger and disappointment all wrapped up in her voice.

Steve coughed out a shaky laugh, "yeah, well. We did the best we could. Did Bruce tell you to…?"

"Of course."

"I should have known."

"He cares, too," Natasha insisted like it was something she had to prove.

"I... I know."

They shared their space for several awkward moments longer, and Natasha hesitated only for a moment before reclaiming her former seat beside the soldier. He pressed gently back into her warm shoulder, silently conveying his gratitude for her presence; for her touch. She was a lot like Clint, in that way—in a lot of ways, honestly—ready to offer what was needed without making him feel indebted or guilty for accepting it. Knowing what he lacked before he did.

It had taken time, as all things did, but Natasha had been the first of the Avengers to wordlessly accept Steve as their leader. Her mind worked like her body—efficiently and silently—and it hadn't been difficult for her to see him as the vital key that their messy group dynamic had been waiting for, the single missing cog from their now well-oiled machine.

Honestly, it had taken much longer for him to accept himself in the same role.

"Thanks," he repeated, wincing again at the way his mouth was spitting out words before his mind could double-check their validity.

The redhead looked surprised, because of course she knew that he wasn't talking about the jacket any more.

"Thanks?" She echoed, giving him the chance to pull it back or pass it off.

He didn't.

"For... trusting me."

One of the realest smiles he'd ever seen crossed quickly over her beautiful features, and she nodded once. "I don't do it lightly."

"I know," he tried for an exhausted smile, and tightened his arms across his chest even though the motion pulled at his wound. "That's why I should thank you. Took me long enough to say it, after all."

Natasha bumped his knee playfully with her own, and slowly stood. "Don't thank me, Cap," she placed her hands on her hips and cocked her head down at him, her sharp eyes missing nothing and her lips pressing briefly into a thin line. "Just take care of yourself."

Steve's throat did that funny, suspicious little choking motion again, and he bowed his head to hide the pained grimace that holding it back cost him.

When he pulled his gaze up again, Natasha was gone.


	9. Heat

**.**

**C9: Heat**

**.**

By the time Thor arrived on the Hellicarrier deck, pummeling into the ship like an asteroid rolled in a thunderstorm, Steve was convinced both that he was running an abnormally high fever and that if he didn't find a way to appease it, he was going to be in serious trouble.

As the lights flickered slightly and the storm outside crackled and ripped, Steve made his way unsteadily down the canting hallways, one hand out to steady himself on the trembling walls. Thor's melodramatic appearances from other realms rarely bothered the super-soldier much, but today it felt like the slightest disturbance was enough to send the entire world spinning in his vision. He couldn't help wishing the Asgardian god would find another way to announce his presence to the world at large than initiating a localized earthquake.

Grateful for once for a technology he neither fully understood nor regularly appreciated, Steve waved his hand uncertainly in front of the plain gray doors that lead to the Deck One lavatories. He was still a little in awe of the way they magically slid apart with a sound like the compression of air, but he really had more important things on his mind at the moment.

Stepping inside, the soldier made a beeline for the nearest sink and cranked the slender silver faucet as far to the left as it would go, wincing a little as it creaked in protest. Bending over the wide, shared basin that stretched in both directions the length of the long mirror, the soldier cupped the icy water in his palms and doused his face, huffing a little at the temperature shock. Even through the cold liquid he could feel the clamminess and heat radiating from his skin.

Groaning quietly to himself at this added complication, the soldier let his forehead tilt forward against the mirror, relishing the deep chill that reached out from the glass to soothe his aching brain and a body that clearly couldn't decided if it wanted him to freeze to death or boil in his own skin. Through half-lidded eyes, he watched the thick drops of moisture roll from his skin onto the class and downwards in uneven little trails.

"Steve," came a not-unexpected voice from the door; a presence so quiet and still that it seemed to negate even the soft sound of the door sliding open.

Aside from Natasha and her ghost-like ability to move without so much as disturbing the air around her, Clint Barton was the most silent person Steve knew.

"Here."

Steve pulled back from the mirror quickly, swiping at the moisture on his face to hide the tell-tale signs of his futile attempt to pull himself together. His tone came out somewhat sharper than he had intended, but he couldn't find it in his heart to make an apology for that.

He wasn't sure why, but some deep, coiling darkness inside of him felt slightly betrayed by Clint. He could put neither rhyme nor reason to the sentiment, especially considering how supportive and relatively calm the assassin had been over the course of the past several days, but something about the archer's conspicuous absence that morning, coupled with the knowledge that Clint had confided any small detail of what had happened to Natasha... the elements combined sparked a surprising flame of resentment deep in the solder's gut and try as he might, it was a sentiment he found himself unable to easily relinquish.

"What's wrong?"

As usual, the assassin read the soldier's mood and meaning in the space of a heartbeat, cutting through hedged protests and half-hearted defenses to come as if they barely existed.

"Nothing," the soldier lied, and to his own ears the answer sounded slightly more believable than the last.

"Don't insult me, Steve," the words were sharp but Clint's tone was not, carrying a gentleness the soldier was long accustomed to, but at this particular moment, just seemed to rub salt into every open wound.

"What did you need?" The soldier tried to side-step the conflict boiling between them, because he wasn't sure if he could handle alienating the two most important people in his life at the same time.

Clint was quiet a moment, stretching the silence out longer than necessary in a move that was so distinctly _Tony_ that the soldier couldn't resist sneaking a glance up into the mirror, just to satisfy the irrational concern that maybe Tony was the one standing in the bathroom with him after all and his fevered mind was already preying on his fears.

Clint stood near those mystifying sliding doors, just where Steve knew he would be. There was something inexplicably closed off about his features; something still and deep. He wore the face of a man hiding his true sentiments from the object of the same.

"Banner just arrived," Clint chose to answer the literal question rather than the figurative one hanging in the air between them, crackling with energy and a strange tension they dared not address directly. "And Fury's in with Stark. Figured we would be starting the briefing soon."

Steve looked away and straightened up, swallowing back the way the room tilted around him, "what does Fury want with Tony?"

A restrained grin twitched at the corner of Clint's mouth. "I wouldn't know. But I don't think he was happy."

Steve frowned and chanced another quick glance up through the mirror to meet the assassin's face, to try and read what was hidden there. "What makes you say that?"

"Maybe the way I could hear him through the door."

Steve winced. He would have liked to hope their argument had nothing to do with him, but he knew from experience that he didn't have that kind of luck.

"Steve."

The soldier didn't quite realize how long he had been standing there, staring unseeingly down into the stream of still-running water, until a warm hand on his elbow and a voice closer than before made him jump.

This time, the assassin couldn't completely disguise his concern as he eyed the super solider warily. "Steve, if you're not up to this mission—"

"I am," Steve interrupted forcefully, lethargy and bottled-up emotion combining to lend a harshness to his voice that was not his own.

Clint didn't look convinced. "Look, Bruce insisted that you just needed some time to rest to get over this; to heal up and let your body do it's own work. God knows there's not a lot we can do to speed that along. But if you don't have that time, you could put yourself in some serious danger, here—"

"And if I don't do my _job,_ I could put the rest of you in serious danger," Steve retorted, his side twinging unexpectedly in response to his entire body seizing up. The anger churning in his chest like an ugly beast, waiting to explode, was making his head throb and his vision fade in and out.

"Steve," the gentleness in Clint's tone now bordered on condescension, and Steve clenched his fists. "we'll survive without you."

The words were Clint's but in Steve's mind, the voice was Tony's.

_I will survive without you. I don't need you. You are replaceable. _

Something painful seized up in the soldier's lungs, making it difficult to remember how to breathe.

With one trembling, fumbling hand, Steve reached down and roughly shut the faucet off. He longed to lean down again, to drown his heated skin in the coolness of the running water, but he couldn't afford such a display in front of Clint.

Clint was still standing too close when Steve turned around, green eyes watching him sharply, missing nothing. Steve paused, and shouldered his way around the archer, that old anger mixing with nausea, stress, and worry to set every nerve on a knife's edge.

"Let's go," the soldier left the mantle of friendship behind and shrugged into the more familiar one of Captain America, drawing up his shoulders and straightening his back as if the weight of the world were not bearing down upon him, suffocating. "You know how much Fury hates to wait."

Clint did know, but of course he said nothing as he followed Steve out into the hallway and down towards the lift that would transport them to the lower deck.

Steve made a point of standing slightly in front of Clint as they entered and waited, facing the doors, hoping to disguise a moment of crippling vulnerability as he shut his eyes and drew in a breath and battled a moment of irrational, inexplicable near-panic. Something inside of him was pushing him to fear, to crumble. He pushed back, and cursed his own weakness.

A week ago, he wouldn't have believed that he needed anyone this badly; wouldn't have believed that anyone could move him to his kind of senseless, throbbing emotion and tailspinning loss of control. Even Tony. He would have lied to himself last week, and insisted to his own traitorous heart and anyone who dared to ask that Steve Rogers was a man out of time, and when time moved on without him, he would feel no regret.

And now? It was safe to say that circumstances vastly beyond his control had conspired to prove otherwise... to prove that even Captain America was bound to the earth by that most primal and simplistic of human emotions.

Love.

And God as his witness, it was killing him.

**.**

Steve's shoulder were rigid and set, and from Clint's perspective behind and just to the left of the soldier, he looked the picture of poise, a pillar of strength and confidence.

But Steve didn't realize that the elevator doors were reflective, and that the assassin had a clear glimpse of the soldier's crumpling features as he struggled to pull himself together through confusion and pain.

Steve didn't know. And for a man who was smarter than he thought he was and more solidly good than almost anyone Clint could think of, Steve didn't know a lot of things.

For example, Steve didn't know that haunting the edges of their friendship was a secret pain; a burden that was the archer's to bear alone. He didn't know that every time they exchanged a friendly embrace or a glancing touch, it was maybe the most painful thing Clint had ever felt.

He didn't know—though it seemed there were moments when he could have suspected, and chose not to for the sake of simplicity—that Clint was _there_ in every sense of the word, even if it killed him inside to stand by and watch the man for whom he had long ago developed more than brotherly affection subject himself to the abuse of a man who did not deserve him.

Barton wasn't exactly sure when he had made himself aware of this thing; this unsettling burden. It had been slow and casual, unobtrusive, creeping up upon him like a slow poison. By the time he was aware of its presence, it was already too late. He could no more stop the traitorous tides of his own feelings than he could the pull of gravity.

It simply was.

Few of the Avengers even suspected this thing that had grown in Clint, a strange new monster he was too inexperienced and imbalanced to tame. Tony suspected, of course, but only because he was a hyper-paranoid genius who felt irrational jealousy towards anyone who even glanced at Steve sideways.

Natasha knew.

A whiplash romance between himself and Natasha had simply always _been_; a dark presence lurking beneath the surface of a still water. Some nights it exploded into violence or passion or both, but by morning light it was a staggered, unwieldy state of being that never quite made proper sense, and the two reverted automatically back to comfortable silence and lingering looks.

Clint had once assumed that he and Natasha had never properly clicked because she naturally shied away from that kind of attachment: to anyone, though lord knew it had grown between them in the form of friendship, despite her best efforts to stay it. Now, the archer suspected that this—this nameless, poison-tipped thing—was the real reason that they had never moved that one step further, never past the physical remnants of something that had never been, and still managed to haunt them both.

So for now Clint found himself in the unenviable position of being unable to reciprocate the feelings of a person who just might have been perfect for him in another life, and simultaneously longing only to be perfect for the one person who might never reciprocate his feelings.

Clint purposefully tore his eyes away from the soldier's tortured reflection, a moment of presumed privacy to which he should never have been privy in the first place, and cursed his own emotions.

He set himself instead to the task of composing a solution to the tension that had somehow sparked between them. It was a situation that was, he knew, partially his fault, but seemed to be born of something further as well, an element he couldn't quite pin down.

Steve might not even know why he was angry himself, but Clint knew. At the very least, he suspected. If the soldier was not the most private person he'd ever met, he was definitely contending for the title. As such, becoming his friend had been an uphill journey that was slow and painstaking and worth every step, and left the archer with a near-uncanny insight into the man's inner workings.

Steve was guarded, but he was not complex.

The solider felt deeply—deeper than most men, more true and real—and he felt long. He didn't let go of things easily, though when he chose to forgive it was the kind of forgiveness that made it seem as if he'd written the offense down on something and hurled it into outer space, never to be seen again. In that sense, the soldier reminded Clint of a child. So willing to trust, so deeply hurt when that trust was betrayed, and yet so quick to forgive the most grievous of offense and hand his battered heart right back to the person that had damaged it the most.

In Clint's mind, that person was Tony Stark, and even thinking about the man so soon after what he had done to Steve set the archer's blood boiling.

He'd resisted taking his anger out on the billionaire so far simply because the last time he'd attempted to do so, the two of them had hurt Steve in the process, an unfortunate event that still turned Clint's stomach when he remembered the expression of pain he'd caused. The next time, he swore, Steve wouldn't be anywhere around for what he had to say to Tony, and he knew Stark would agree on the point.

Apparently, the archer and the billionaire could at least agree that the expression of their mutual distaste for one another was not worth letting the soldier get caught up in the crossfire.

For now Clint reined in his surging disgust for Stark and attempted to repack his mind into its usual semblance of order and equation, because this operation rested on the edge of a knife, and it was a balance that could be too easily swayed by a wounded super-solider. He and Tony simply needed to concentrate on not upsetting it any more, for Steve's sake.

When all of this was over, however? He and Tony would be singing a very different tune.

Right now though Steve was angry at him—probably for what he saw as Clint's betrayal of his trust, when in fact the truth was slightly more complex.

The elevator whined as it slowed, ready to deposit them on the command deck. Where not a damn soul was going to ignore the fact that their leader was limping and silent, his eyes dull and tired.

"She asked me," Clint volunteered into the silence without being asked, steeling himself for what would doubtless be the harsh backlash of his own honesty—both with Steve now, and Natasha earlier that morning. "I couldn't lie."

The soldier stiffened slightly, as if drawing in a deep breath, and said nothing.

"They're not fools, Steve. Everyone is going to notice that something is wrong."

Steve turned his head to the side, but didn't fully rotate to look at the archer.

Clint wondered absently if Steve would forgive him this small betrayal if the archer pointed out that Natasha had torn the truth from him when she arrived at his apartment early that morning. She'd picked her way across overturned shelves and scattered files; broken glass and equipment scattered carelessly across the floor.

Clint had torn the place apart in a fit of desperate rage late the night before, and had opted for passing out on a pile of blankets he'd torn off the bed (they still smelled like Steve) rather than attempt to rectify the mess. He'd made several trips back to that blasted tower in an attempt to reach the soldier because he wanted—_needed_—to assure himself that the soldier was fine; was alive—and Tony had turned him away at the door, barely civil.

The first few rejections the archer had borne bravely with gritted teeth and dark glares, but after that... he couldn't handle the volcano of stress building deep in his chest and he'd barely made it back to the safety of his own home before erupting.

Next to Thor, and maybe Bruce when he was busy being "the other guy," Steve was the most physically resilient of the group. The soldier knew it, and used his enhanced physicality as a dual weapon and defense. Clint had seen the soldier punch through walls and come out without a bruise. He'd seen him take blows for _him,_ seen him protect innocent without a thought for his own body.

And yet, there was something about seeing the soldier wounded—Captain America, the flag around which they rallied, their pillar of strength—that so completely _undid_ him. It was foreign, alien; _wrong_ to see Steve that way.

Captain America should not bleed.

Clint had been a mess when Natasha had slapped him harshly across the face and demanded that he pull himself together long enough to tell her what the hell was wrong with him. He noticed that she had her handgun out, now resting in her hand on her knee, as if she had drawn it coming in before she understood that the damage was self-inflicted.

He hadn't told her much, but as was ever the case between them a little was enough. Gears turned and pins clicked into place and the rest of the story she filled in for herself by methods that were half mystifying and half terrifying. She understood that which was not said, and in that moment he prayed that if there were a god, he would make Clint fall in love with her.

God was clearly otherwise indisposed, an allowance the archer made in place of complete disbelief simply for Steve's sake. The soldier had always been ridiculously old-fashioned where religion was concerned, a trait Clint couldn't even bring himself to hate in the man. It fit him, really, in a way it would have fit few others.

"I'm sorry, Steve," it was a resignation; not even a true apology. An olive branch, a concession of sorts to maintain peace between them.

"You don't need to apologize," Steve finally said just as the doors slid open. Despite his words, there was a softness settled in his tone that suggested the apology had done some good, after all.

Ever the trusting one, ever the peacemaker, a trait more distinctively Steve Rogers than it was Captain America.

Clint stood silently where he was for a moment, watching Steve step out onto the deck as if he were perfectly fine, greeting passing agents with only a little less than his usual somber cordiality. Nothing that would alarm them, certainly nothing they would ever dare remark upon. Everyone would see the change—how could they miss it?—but only those who knew him best would catch the small things: a slight hitch to his step, the practiced, too-casual smile; the light sheen of perspiration on his brow or the way his hands trembled if he didn't remember to keep his fingers clenched into a fist.

Clint breathed out raggedly and stepped out of the elevator, reminding himself firmly of his resolution not to beat Tony into a bloody pulp until this was over.

It seemed a more challenging task would be keeping Steve on his feet for the next twenty-four hours.

**.**

Steve hoped he didn't look as bad as he felt as he stepped into the briefing room and took his seat at his customary position just left of center, where he could face Fury and still get a good look at the rest of his team as they prepared for combat.

Tony, he marked without actually looking directly in his lover's direction, was not sitting where he usually did, but rather completely across the table. If Steve was the conspiratorial type he could have sworn the billionaire was sitting as far away from him as physically possible.

The soldier swallowed back the sordid agony that the thought provoked and focused instead on being grateful that no-one would be sitting close enough to him to feel the furnace-like heat rolling off his skin in waves. He didn't think Fury would pull him off the mission if it was something important enough to merit their gathering in the first place, but then again, Fury probably didn't know that Steve was this poorly off.

As much as Steve hated lying to anyone... this was his team they were talking about. There wasn't a chance in hell that he was going to sit by and watch them all endanger themselves without him. Maybe it didn't make much sense, but he'd always felt a little better about leading his comrades—his _friends—_into a war not their own if he was by their side, ready and willing to protect them.

"Steven," Thor boomed across the room, having apparently only just caught sight of the soldier, "you appear ill, my friend. How fare you?"

Steve winced silently, and he'd never regretted the Asgardian god's social ignorance as much as he did at that moment. Out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw Tony twitch in movement, but the soldier managed not to look in his direction.

He didn't think he could afford to right now.

"I'm dandy," he retorted, and didn't realize how sharp his tone was until he heard the sound in his own voice.

Thor, who was as apt a translator of vocal inflection as he was of social cues, grinned widely, "I am glad to hear you say so."

"When you're all done yakking like a bunch of gossiping little girls," Fury griped at them as he entered the room, slapping a stack of thin, unmarked files down on his side of the table, "then maybe we can finally get down to business."

It may have been Steve's imagination, overactive and on-edge as it was, but he thought that Fury's gaze lingered on him for a beat too long as the commander stalked across the room.

Bruce filed in a moment later, Clint behind him. Steve guessed that they'd paused to speak on the deck outside, and again his mind was quick to leap to conclusions.

Fury didn't even bother waiting for the final team members to take their seats before he began, no-nonsense and brisk as always.

"You may have heard of an alien race called the Kree."

Steve hadn't, but a precursory glimpse around the table was quick to reveal the dawning of realization on Bruce's face specifically, and Thor had gone slack-jawed in disbelief.

"They are here?" Surprise was evident in the thunder god's voice, "on Earth?"

"It looks that way," Fury pressed his lips into a thin line and clasped his hands behind his back.

"They are at war," Thor went on with all the familiarity of a sports fan touching on the politics of rival teams, "they would be unlikely to trouble themselves with a foreign world."

"I don't claim to know what kind of logic is knocking around in those ugly little heads of theirs," Fury all but snapped, possessing less patience with the Asgardian's innocent observations than most, "all I know is that they have made contact with us."

The commander turned to survey the rest of the team, seated expectantly as they watched this conversation unfold.

"As I was saying—the Kree have sent us an encrypted missive that implies their readiness for war with Earth. As Thor pointed out, these buggers are already at war with another alien race known as the Skrull. We can only assume from their brief contact that these guys are looking for some kind of new weapon here—a tactical advantage, a fresh battleground, slaves to power their conflict—who the hell knows. They weren't kind enough to specify."

"But they haven't actually attacked yet," Bruce pointed out, his tone pensive and thoughtful as though he were working through a math problem.

"No," Fury frowned, and his gaze skittered across the table to lock firmly with Steve's, "they have demanded a 'council', as they put it. With our mightiest warriors."

That, Steve understood.

"What could they possibly want?" The soldier mused out loud.

"That's what all of you—" Fury freed one hand just long enough to gesture across the width of the circular table, "—will be finding out. If there's any way to avoid a war here, I expect you to make it happen."

For the first time since he'd entered the room, Steve found his steel resolve crumbling and almost against his will, he found his eyes moving automatically across the table to rest on Tony, who had so far said not a word to Steve or anyone else in the room.

The billionaire's eyes were fixed unseeingly on a point just over Fury's shoulder, providing a deceptively realistic facsimile of standing at attention. He was listening, Steve knew—Tony had an uncanny ability to multitask that rivaled a super computer—but otherwise his mind was so far removed from the room that he might as well have been absent entirely.

Steve swallowed down that old bubbling despair, and returned his full attention to the rest of his team.

"Their leader calls himself Jar-Sing," Fury was going on, flipping through a sheaf of papers which he had presumably retrieved from his case files, "they haven't communicated much besides a vague threat to humanity, but they were very specific about meeting our 'mightiest warriors'—read: all of you—in person, at this location."

The commander slid the file across the table, and Tony startled them all by reaching out with reflexes that betrayed his spaced-out expression and halting it beneath his fingertips. He shunted aside the top layer of meaningless paperwork and his dark eyes narrowed fractionally.

"The coordinates listed here—I presume that you translated them from the Kree language?"

"On the contrary," Fury straightened up, "they were already translated for us. Into every known human language. A couple unknown ones too, for that matter."

"Interesting," remarked the billionaire, and slapped the file closed. He slid it across to Natasha, who gave him an unreadable look before opening it herself.

"The Himalayas?"

"They couldn't have picked a nice tropical island somewhere..." Bruce sighed regretfully, a half-smile fleeting across his lips.

"What is the Himlay?" Thor frowned, an expression matched by Clint as the thunder god effectively butchered the name.

"Himalayas," Natasha corrected gently, passing the file to Thor as if he could somehow gain knowledge from the thing, "a mountain range in Asia."

"These coordinates, specifically, point to a remote region of west Nepal," Fury explained, "and your butts are going to be firmly planted there by this time tomorrow."

No-one had anything to offer past that, so Fury took the nearest empty seat and gestured at Thor.

"And now, our gracious volunteer will be telling us everything he knows about the Kree."

Thor stood, and gladly obliged.

Steve, grateful for the opportunity to cradle his aching head while still appearing to be paying close attention to the briefing, which had somehow evolved into a lengthy diatribe on the origins of the Kree race in somewhat confusing old-world vernacular, leaned back in his chair and did just that.

Out of the corner of his eye he noted that Tony still refused to look in his direction, but his presence could not be ignored. The billionaire's aura radiated out at the soldier from across the room in much the same way that Steve felt his fever must be, making it hard to breathe and think and do anything really other than sit there and try to take in the strange information being presented.

Steve worried at his bottom lip, willed the chill of fever away, and tried to focus.

Whatever was going on between he and Tony—and it frightened him more than he wanted to admit that he had no idea how to define it—it would have to wait.


	10. Breathe

**.**

**C10: Breathe**

**.**

If Steve had held out any kind of hope that Tony might snap out of his self-imposed isolation and make his peace with him before Fury jettisoned them all off into a potentially deadly situation, it was crushed immediately.

As soon as their briefing concluded, Tony launched out of his seat and disappeared in the direction of crew quarters. The others filed out slowly to collect their bags—they would be boarding the transport for Nepal within the hour—and only Clint was unable to resist lingering to shoot him a worried look.

Steve pointedly ignored the archer until he too, left the room, and then he coaxed his aching body up out of his seat as slowly and gently as possible. He couldn't spare himself the agony of movement entirely, however, and was forced to pause for breath halfway up with one bracing hand on the circular table.

"Not lookin' so hot, soldier."

It was the voice more than the unexpected hand on his elbow that startled Steve, or so he told himself. He automatically straightened, the soldier in him kicking into high gear as he realized Director Fury had not left the room as he'd thought.

"Just a little tired, sir," Steve hedged, trying for a healthy nod as he squared his shoulders and dropped his hand from his side. He wasn't even aware of planting it there, protectively cradling the too-tender flesh beneath fabric and bandage.

"Son, I would say that a good night's sleep is the least of your concerns right now." For perhaps the first time, Nick Fury's voice held something more than professional, and the facade of the tough-as-nails warrior who directed some of the world's most dangerous forces seemed to crack a little. And though they seemed to forget—tried to, at times—beneath it all, Fury was just as human as the rest of them.

"I'm fit for duty," Steve defended preemptively, desperate to belay what was sure to come, sure to leave him waiting in an infirmary while his comrades marched to war... a scenario he'd suffered too many times in the past; too many times in dreams to bear again.

"Of course," Fury nodded, his practiced calm unable to completely mask the resignation in his voice. "Your team trusts you to make that decision. And _I_ trust you wouldn't be so foolish as to endanger your own men, your teammates and followers, by traipsing into combat while you were compromised."

Fury looked up, then, meeting the soldier's eyes. The solemnity in his gaze made Steve blanch a little as he saw the choice before him and processed the words. Fury was giving him a choice. Allowing him to make a judgment call. _Trusting_ him to make the right decision for his team regardless of what sacrifice that might mean from him.

The only problem with such a crucial decision was simply that Steve himself had no idea, in this scenario, what the truly selfless decision was. He knew his team needed him: they relied on his stoicism and his ability to remain calm and rational under stress, to pull them together when they were falling apart and make the hard calls when there appeared no black and white but only shades of gray. '

But in his current condition, he could no longer deny the fear that maybe he would be more a liability than an asset. Fury's words only echoed his own thoughts.

"The Kree will be expecting the earth's mightiest heroes," Steve murmured, eyes fixed unseeingly on the glass table beneath his fingertips. The decision came with the words, defining his own thoughts before he knew them himself. "And they'll have their strongest warriors there to meet us. I can't send them into that alone."

"Always the soldier," Fury smiled, and he didn't look surprised to hear those words, "but I guess that's what we keep you around for."

"Hopefully for more than that," Steve tried again for levity, but he was simply too tired. Too worn-down, too exhausted and threadbare. He had nothing left to give.

Fury didn't seem to mind, and raised a hand to clap Steve on the back. "Take care of yourself, kid. Take care of them."

"I will." It was a promise.

"I know," Fury spoke over his shoulder, and left Steve alone with his thoughts.

**.**

Steve didn't have a lot to pack, and what he needed he'd brought from Stark Tower in a single canvas duffel bag that still sat on the deck where he'd dropped it. When the call came to prepare for takeoff, he picked it up and carried it with him towards the monstrous green transport that would be shuttling the team to Nepal.

As he approached the craft, Steve lifted his head to find that he'd arrived at the steps at the same time as Tony. On any other day, this might have sparked a sarcastic remark from the billionaire, a witty comment and a winning smile.

"Brains before beauty," Tony would say, and then help himself up the ladder in front of Steve, who would grin and laugh and not really mind at all.

Today, there was no easy banter; no comfortable camaraderie. Instead the soldier hesitated awkwardly at the steps, and then stood aside. He averted his eyes and waited for Tony to climb the stairs, taking them two at a time, not saying a word.

Feeling strangely crestfallen, Steve took a deep breath and followed. He didn't need to look up to see Natasha behind him, watching him with unreadable eyes. He didn't need to look to see her glare up after Tony.

"Mom and dad are fighting again," He heard Clint remark darkly just as Steve reached the platform, though it was clear that the brunt of his animosity was fixed squarely on Tony. Maybe it was something about the way he was glaring daggers across the deck at the oblivious billionaire.

Bruce, the lucky recipient of this remark, sighed and rubbed at his eyes, saying nothing.

Steve set his jaw and brushed by the two of them, finding a seat in one of the empty, heavy-duty chairs near the cargo doors towards the back of the plane. Apparently even the respectful distance he had put between himself and Tony wasn't quite enough, because within moments the billionaire jerked up out of his seat and made his way down the aisle, disappearing into the cargo partition.

Steve pressed himself back into his seat and bit his lip, focusing every ounce of his willpower into looking as if the other man's retreat wasn't destroying him inside.

He didn't have to see it; didn't even have to look up to catch it out of the corner of his vision. He could literally _feel_ the pained look Clint was giving him from across the small space, too full of pity and condescension, even if the archer meant well. His eyes burned against Steve's skin like a brand, fire-hot and impossible to ignore.

That didn't mean the soldier wasn't going to try. Shutting his eyes tightly against a reality that had become too harsh for him; too cold for his body and too dark for his soul, he drew in several long cleansing breaths and willed himself to fall asleep.

He stayed this way for the next forty minutes as the plane was loaded, flight plans were checked, and the doors secured. He stayed that way (though maybe his hands tightened on the arms of his seat just a little) as the engine hummed to life and the monstrous craft accelerated and took off. He stayed that was as they climbed into the clouds and leveled off, settling into that familiar dull roar that would mark the next fourteen hours of flight time.

Here he would remain, he imagined, lost in his own limbo, until they touched down in a foreign country and stepped off to meet a foreign race. In fact he'd been so sure that rest would be unable to find him that when it did, it came upon him like a thief in the night.

Consciousness slipped away quietly and he fell into a dreamless sleep.

**.**

Steve startled awake, disoriented by the bright light streaming in through the porthole windows and the steady hum of the plane engines. He blinked owlishly at the passenger bay around him and quickly discovered that all was quiet and still—or at least as quiet as it could get when you were locked in a flying piece of metal twelve thousand feet above sea level.

He wasn't sure what had woken him, or where they were or how long they'd been in the air. He wasn't sure of much of anything, really, and that didn't sit well with him.

Standing stiffly, the soldier was reminded in one gut-dropping sweep of all that was still dreadfully wrong with his body—in fact, he was fairly certain he felt something tear in his gut as he moved a little too quickly.

Grasping the seat in front of him with both hands, Steve dropped his head between his arms and heaved for air as quietly as he could manage, his skin seeming to heat to nearly unbearable temperatures as he waited, and he _really_ should have thought this through earlier.

He could feel a strange new warmth blossoming in his side, and he swore softly to himself as he considered the implications of reopening his wound... again. He was fairly certain that most of his other colorful bruises and cracked bones should have knitted themselves back together by now, but he'd done more damage to his abdomen than his serum-enhanced metabolism could fix so easily. Particularly when he kept opening and reopening the damned thing.

Feeling a little steadier, the soldier pushed himself back into an upright position—far more gently, this time—and tried standing again. So long as he was very careful, he found he could manage the task with very little pain. That didn't mean he was back in fighting condition, his mind reminded him with some trepidation, or that he would be by the time they arrived.

He sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to that.

A precursory glance around the cabin showed him that most of his team was occupied. Bruce was awake, but with his eyes fixed firmly out the window, deep in thought; Natasha reclined on a bench seat. She appeared to be asleep, but you could never really tell with her. She could just as easily be meditating, or reciting something in Russian, or one of a million other things. Clint sat against the far wall in a seat facing opposite the others in the cabin, head down and fingers steepled between his knees. His eyes were closed, but he clearly wasn't sleeping.

Tony was nowhere to be seen, and Thor sat alone in a seat across from Banner. With only a moment's hesitation, the soldier made his way up the deck towards him.

He lowered himself gingerly into the seat beside the Norse god, allowing his body a moment to adjust to the new position before relaxing into the seat. Or trying to. His muscles didn't seem keen on anything but seizing up in agony every time he shifted.

Thor was now giving him a worried look out of the corner of his eye and doing a very poor job of disguising it. He looked like he might be right on the verge of making a comment about it, even.

Steve couldn't have that. He couldn't have any of his team concerned about his well-being over their own, not with these kind of stakes.

"You're concerned about this meeting," the soldier diverted instead, mostly guessing what he had suspected since the briefing, and the grim look that settled across the Norseman's features was enough to confirm the truth.

The soldier nodded in acknowledgment, clasping his hands between his knees as he leaned forward. He allowed himself a moment to process the implications of all that may not have been said during the team briefing.

"What can we expect?" He asked quietly at length, looking up to read Thor's face.

Thor looked troubled, and was silent for a long moment before he made a reply. "They're likely to ask only for our strongest warrior to parlay with theirs. If negotiations are not concluded peacefully, they will do battle."

"The Hulk," Steve filled in without further prompting.

Steve and Thor both looked across at Bruce. The dark-haired man couldn't have missed their conversation, but he remained where he was, calm and still, as though he hadn't heard Thor's words. His brown eyes were fixed on the tiny round window beside his shoulder, distant and clouded as if he were daydreaming.

Steve let out a deep breath through his nose, trying to calculate how this new information might affect their chances. "Why didn't you share this earlier?" He asked, and couldn't entirely keep the frustration out of his voice.

For what it was worth, Thor already looked properly contrite. "I was uncertain of its relevance," he admitted. "My dealings with the Kree are quite limited, and I believed they may have amended their treaty practices as they have their invasion techniques."

"Invasion."

Thor sighed gently and looked away. "I have considered it at great length. I can see no other reason for their arrival."

Steve, and he was certain, the other members of the team, had suspected the same. But to hear it from Thor—universally accepted as the group's foremost authority on the subject—made it altogether too real for comfort.

"No chance they want an old-fashioned slave race, I suppose?" Bruce asked wryly from across the aisle, breaking his silence, but not his blank stare out the small porthole window.

"It is not likely, friend Banner," answered Thor grimly, missing the dry humor in the question altogether. "They would have no need of us, with the countless weaker races the already hold in subservience. Resources can be their only logical target here."

"Right." Steve pursed his lips, and then nodded his head toward Bruce. "How would a Kree warrior stand up to the Hulk?"

"I have great faith in friend Banner's ability to triumph," Thor nodded emphatically, the familiar pride and mirth returning to his voice. "They chose an ill day to wage war on Earth, I daresay."

Even Bruce had to crack a smile at this open display of confidence, and he finally looked away from the window to make eye contact, however brief, with Steve. "He'll do what has to be done," he answered the unspoken question in the soldier's eyes. "I guess it'll be a far sight easier if it _is_ one-on-one this time."

Steve couldn't argue with that, as much as he hated the idea of sending any member of his team into combat alone. "We'll be standing by if you need us," he promised. "But for now... let's hope it doesn't come to that."

Bruce nodded and Thor fell back into the uncharacteristic frowning silence that meant he hadn't quite finished mulling over the situation. Selfishly, the soldier hoped that the Norse god wouldn't hit upon any more game-changing revelations during his reflections. They had enough to deal with as it was.

Steve pried himself out of his chair and left them both to their thoughts.

He'd made a decision, quick and impulsive as he sat there and listened to Thor. He wasn't sure where it had come from or how it had sparked, so quick and strong within him, but he was determined to make the best of it before he lost his resolve.

Stepping carefully to avoid aggravating an injury that was already warning him that it had taken more than enough abuse for one day, thank you very much, he moved down the over-wide aisle of the transport towards the heavy canvas partition that separated the double rows of seating from the cargo bay in the back of the jet.

It took a few moments, but eventually his eyes adjusted to the oppressive darkness within—there were no windows here—and he caught sight of Tony crouched over one of the crates he'd had loaded onto the plane before their departure. Doubtless, it held one version or another of the billionaire's trademark armored suit.

Without his consent, memory returned. The last time he'd seen that suit, Stave had been half-convinced it would kill him. Goosebumps made their way up his arms at that, and he shook them off with as much fervor as he could manage. Now was not the time for such needless thoughts. They would be nothing but harmful to them, considering what lay ahead.

"Tony," he called into the darkness, proud that he sounded as calm as he did.

Stark remained where he was, the rhythmic, clicking sound of a ratchet wrench the only sound in the stillness as he tinkered away with some detail or another. He made no response.

"Tony," Steve tried again to infuse strength into his voice, and failed miserably. "Talk to me. Please." He hated himself for that last word as soon as it left his lips, but he couldn't take it back. He wouldn't.

The sound of the ratchet went quiet, and Tony went still. A beat passed, and then he pressed the tool back into it's case with great deliberation and stood, wiping off his hands, his figure barely a misshapen shadow in the gloom.

Steve knew his lover had heard him and so he did not speak again, waiting silently where he stood for the other man to make some move—to speak, to do anything. Anything would be better than the silence, the avoidance, the pointedly averted eyes. He'd thought he would be able to wait; thought he could bare this terse silence and horrible tension until all of this was through, but he'd been wrong. If he had to wait another minute to put a name to what was happening between them, sapping their strength like a slow poison... well, he couldn't be held responsible for what he might do.

It had to end.

After he had taken his time cleaning hands that probably hadn't even been dirty in the first place, the billionaire straightened to his full height, dropped the rag, and shook out his shoulders. The moment Tony turned to look at him directly, Steve felt it more than saw it. It set his nerves on edge and reignited the chill on his fever-flushed skin. He wasn't sure why it made him so uneasy.

It seemed to take forever for Tony to move. He approached the soldier slowly, like a great cat stalking his prey, and Steve automatically tensed up. He watched his lover approach with wary, guarded eyes, hating that even now—even here—he couldn't begin to guess what the billionaire would do next. He didn't realize until a heartbeat later that this realization was the understatement of the century.

Tony reached forward: no faltering, no indecision, and wrapped his hand around the back of Steve's neck and pulled, and kissed him. And damned if that wasn't the last thing in the world the soldier had been expecting.

It was a kiss unlike any Steve remembered—at least, from the time between now and when they'd first made all of this official. Slow and hard and burning. A kiss like their first ones had been, more passion and lust and pure _need_ than either of them could rationally handle. It was the kind of furious longing that pulled a man out of his right mind and into pure chaos without rules or safety nets. The kind of need that changed you into someone you didn't even recognize; someone who would do just about anything to assuage that wave of pure fire, to quench the drunkenness with even more wine.

Unable to resist the surge of heat that coursed through his body, Steve gasped and stiffened and that was all the encouragement Tony needed. The brunette wound his fingers into the short hair at the base of Steve's skull and pulled the soldier in, impossibly close and then closer still.

Too disoriented to do much more than grip his lover's forearms and struggle to stay standing, Steve tried weakly to match Tony's passion as his hot, demanding tongue quested into the soldier's mouth, not so much asking for permission as claiming a right. Tony knew, as ever, exactly what he wanted. He took it, asking for nothing.

As ever, Steve let him. And he damned himself for his own weakness, but Tony was his truest and most painful Achilles heel, the one for whom he would do anything... be anything, give anything. Suffer anything.

Moving even closer, closer than was physically possible, Tony pushed the soldier out of his own space and up against the cold steel supports of the wall behind him. He held him there, flush with his own body, and refused to release his mouth. Steve became clay in his hands, pliant and helpless because despite all of his physical strength, with Tony... he became nothing. He had no defense for this, no vibranium shield and regenerating tissue. He felt raw and vulnerable and terribly exposed, and the worst part was that he wasn't even sure he could place that kind of trust in Tony anymore.

He did anyway.

Tony's free hand came up to grip the soldier's jaw, tilting his head to allow better access for the hot, searing tongue that seemed intent on exploring every inch of him. Of course Steve let him; of course Steve's body betrayed him and responded to every touch and every movement, pushing against Tony, craving the old spark of skin against skin. For the first time in what felt like ages he didn't need to pep-talk himself into returning his lover's desire: his body responded long before his mind did, leaving him achingly hard and half-mad with need.

When the billionaire pulled back, the soldier found that drawing in a shuddering breath was a conscious effort. Steve stared at his lover with dazed, half-lidded eyes, his head spinning so fast he couldn't even be sure he was awake. It took him a minute of blinking dumbly and reminding himself over and over again like a cruel mantra to _pull it together_ to realize that Tony was literally holding him up, strong hands bracing him against the bulkhead.

Tony said nothing, but he watched like a hawk as Steve gasped for breath and laboriously reoriented himself on his own two feet. Before, the gloom had seemed masking. Now it seemed to bring every detail of the brunette's face into sharp relief, highlighting the sharp colors of his eyes as they watched the blond struggle to regain his bearings.

Steve felt like he couldn't catch his breath, couldn't find his balance after that unexpected onslaught. This probably had something to do with his climbing temperature and still-too-recent blood loss, but coupled with such an emotional attack it nearly undid him.

"Why?" He gasped miserably, brows furrowing in something between hopeless confusion and anger.

Tony pushed him upwards, firm but gentle, and made sure he was sufficiently supported by the wall before he pulled reluctantly away.

"Just in case," the billionaire breathed, as if to himself.

"What the hell does that mean?" Steve's ire was rising, which was probably good, because it reminded his body that he should definitely _not_ be aroused right now. Not in the slightest.

"Just in case I never get to do that again," Tony answered, and then he fucking _smiled_. That million dollar smile that wowed audiences around the globe and dazzled investors and reminded the world at large that Tony Stark was a man of money and charm and endless privilege.

When it was pointed at Steve like a weapon meant to blind him, it simply hurt.

Steve sucked in a ragged breath and then another, pressing his trembling hands to his throbbing side _hard _in a vain attempt to ground himself. His heart was still pumping blood through his veins like a steam engine, matching the beat of his pounding skull and the sound of his uneven breaths.

"What, are you planning a vacation?" Steve bit out weakly when he felt he had regained at least some of his slipping composure.

"You never know."

Something in those words, something harsh and final and ominous as all hell alarmed Steve, and he looked up quickly.

"We're a few hours out from our landing zone," Tony was saying impassively, studying the edges of his fingertips as if he could actually see them in the half-light. "Just a few hours from a hard decision. But you're good at that, aren't you? Making hard decisions?"

Steve's head was pounding almost too loudly for him to respond, but he _knew._ He knew what Tony meant, what he said without saying, running circles around Steve with his words. He wove syllables like tapestries, meaning and subtlety like silver threads.

"What are you saying?" Steve gasped, the effort to draw in breath enough to paralyze his lungs. He felt like he'd been punched in the stomach, stealing thought and mobility and _everything_. And Tony hadn't even finished yet.

Steve just knew.

"I think you knew this wasn't going to work."

"Stop," Steve begged, his eyes fluttering shut in useless denial. "_Stop_ this, Tony."

"I think you knew. But you don't give up on things. You _wouldn't_ give up; wouldn't give up on me. So I guess it's my turn to make the hard decision."

"_Please_."

_Don't say it, Tony. Don't give up on this._

Tony was quiet for a moment, and Steve could hear that mirthless smile through the darkness.

"It's been grand, kid. But it's time to say goodbye."

Steve's eyes flew open and he reached out with his sight, grasping in the dark for he knew-not-what. He was too late, and caught only the briefest glimpse of light flickering through the canvas as it parted and Tony retreated back into the passenger bay.

Something inside of the soldier snapped, then. Like a physical thing, a rope frayed down to it's last strand simply pulling apart with the strain of the weight that pulled against it. Something _shifted, _ leaving behind a brokenness that was simply a part of the delayed inevitability of their life.

Everything that was left in Steve wanted to slide to the floor and hide his face, hide his breaking heart. He wanted to collapse into the agony and confusion that had somehow become his life and forsake all the responsibility and expectation that was driving him into the ground. More than anything, he longed to curl into himself and break.

But he wasn't just Steve Rogers anymore. He wasn't just a skinny kid from Brooklyn who'd never been quite enough for himself or his family or his country.

He was Captain America, and he'd given up all rights to personal crisis and emotional decisions when he'd taken up the mantle and the image of an entire nation.

Feeling physically sick with grief, Steve allowed himself only the briefest moment to hunch over his knees and pull himself together. Only a moment.

Then he straightened despite every screaming impulse of his body and mind, and closed his eyes. He sucked in breath slowly through his nose as he waited for the deck to stop swimming in his vision, waited for the terrible pounding noise between his ears to subside and relent, even if it wasn't by much.

Before he was entirely confident that he wasn't on the verge of a mental breakdown, the canvas behind him parted again, flooding the mostly-empty cargo bay with light.

Clint—and he didn't have to turn to know it was him, didn't have to ask or hear him speak—was silent for a long moment, as if he could feel the tension in the air; read it like tracks on a riverbed and see all that had passed there in the last few minutes.

"Are you alright?" The archer asked uselessly, his words quiet, but still too loud, almost ringing in the emptiness.

Steve wanted to sob in irrational, senseless anger; wanted to take a swing at Clint. Who did he think he was to do this to him? To ask something like that? To _look_ at him like that, to avoid him without warning, to speak to him with that kindness in his voice... it wasn't right. It couldn't be.

"Steve?"

There it was again, that damn nameless _thing. _Like worry and concern and friendship, and more besides. More than should be there. More than what he wanted to be there and more than he could ignore.

"_Steve_. You're burning up."

That tone, indefinable despite Steve's best attempts to give it a name, had been colored by a very real fear. It was this new element that finally drew Steve out of the mire of his own mind and back into the moment.

"I'm fine," Steve tried to bat away the hand that had come to rest on his forehead, cool and steady, but the words slurred alarmingly.

"Yeah, I don't think even you believe that at this point." Clint sounded so openly fearful that even Steve couldn't ignore him, couldn't ignore that sound.

"Come on," the archer snaked an unwelcome arm around the blond's shoulders, "you need to sit down. _Now."_

"I don't need your help," Steve snapped without meaning to, pushing his friend away because after everything he didn't think he could handle the simplest touch.

"Steve." Clint's grip tightened and he caught the soldier's flailing arm with alarming ease. "You're a freaking inferno right now, buddy. You need to rest and you need to get that fever down, or needing my help is going to the be the least of your worries."

"Don't need..." Steve trailed off, because he couldn't even remember what he'd wanted to say, what he _needed_ to say.

Tony was gone.

Memory and sensation were blending together in a sickening vortex, pulling at the threads of reality and turning them into something unrecognizable. Color and shadow twisted in his vision, and in one heart-stopping moment, he realized that he couldn't tell which way was up.

"Banner!" Clint was yelling, his voice strained and Steve realized that he was supporting the soldier's weight almost entirely. "_Bruce!"_

_Gone._

Steve's knees buckled, his eyes rolling back in his head as he fell. He was unconscious before he hit the deck.

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Whewww. Can you believe I knocked that hyper-emotional whopper out, beginning to end, in one day? That day being today, not that I obsess over things like that.

Anyway. This was an extremely difficult chapter. I hope it didn't feel too repetitive. Also, Tony's POV will come next chapter, for those who have been waiting. Prepare yourself for some serious angst. Oh, wait...

Insert plentiful apologetic platitudes here.

I really am sorry for that wait, but I've run out of ways to express that truthfully. Will more chapters do? I think I've got my inspiration back, though I am still on vacation and may not have an overabundance of time to continue writing.

The point being: I WILL finish this story, and there WILL be a happy (ish) ending. That I can assure you, so breathe easy. You know... if that was something you were worried about... Ahem. Moving on.

Big sloppy kisses or alternatively, cookies to the following beautiful souls: **Alerix Slynn**, **daisyatomic**, **Luna S. Renaldi**, **forgetmenotjimmy**, **Alia Sukai**, **cake house and latte**, **Steph5756lovestwilight**, **MaLonn**, **KatiexTaylor**, **Harlie Rayne**, **xfailingxheartbeatx**, **MorWolfMor**, and **Annie**.

Without you, I am nothing. Or at least, only a tiny teensy bit more than nothing. I certainly would not be a motivated FF writer whoring myself out for reviews. And yes, at this time of night, that is the most intelligible compliment I can come up with... you'll forgive me later.

Also, a big thanks to:

**fangirl29**: Thank you so much, m'dear. As a writer, it makes me smile (big) to hear that the emotion you are trying to convey is coming across. I never really intended to explore Clint as a character as much in this story, but he really has taken on a life of his own. I'm so glad you're enjoying, and I'll be even happier if you come back and keep reading even after I abandoned you all for so long. :)

**GrimmXEchelon**: Maybe this wasn't quite what you were hoping for, but at least Tony finally did something...? (please don't kill me!) I'm glad Clint's big revelation pleased you, it really surprised me when it came into my head and I thought it might make a good... element? Twist? Who knows. Anyhoo, please don't hate me too much for this chapter! I promised things WILL get better... eventually.

**Plushiepaw**: Thank you so much for your lovely review! I hope this chapter scratches a little more of your Steve!whump itch, with which I TOTALLY sympathize. It's why I started writing this pairing in the first place; there's not nearly enough of it out there. So as you can see, Steve and Tony did break up, but I don't see things going quite as you might think. Though I shan't give anything away. ;) Thank you again for your feedback!

**The Dreamer Lady**: Sorry I'm not patching Steve back up _quite_ yet! It will come, I promise. And Steve and Tony will get patched back up, and everything and everyone else, and... well, let me just say that by the end of the story, (almost) all will be well with the world again. Thank you so much for your support and obvious emotional investment. :)

**EvilGeniusBookwormm13**: I'm thrilled you made an exception for this story! I wouldn't want that part to turn you away from reading, especially since I really don't consider domestic violence to be a real element of this fic. It is present, in a way, but it's not the focus, more a side effect of an unhealthy relationship between the two. Anyway, I hope you continue reading and enjoying. Thanks so much for your feedback!


	11. Drift

**.**

**C11: Drift**

**.**

Tony tightened his white-knuckled grip on the handle of his suitcase and didn't look back as he stepped through the cargo bay partition, leaving his heart in pieces behind him. He made a point of not meeting Clint's eyes across the plane—the archer had been watching him like that this entire trip, as if he was just waiting for him to make a mistake.

In a way, Tony couldn't blame him.

The billionaire didn't break stride as he moved calmly towards the front of the plane. Like he gave a damn about any of this. Like his soul wasn't dead. And he really couldn't have said _why_ anymore, but he went through the motions. It was all he had.

Dropping the heavy case onto the mat in front of the cargo doors, he stepped hard on the latch and watched his suit unfold, locking around his ankle and building itself up, plate by plate, over the rest of his body.

"Tony," Natasha appeared at his elbow, and only the dilation of her pupils betrayed her alarm. The woman had a poker face to rival God's. "What are you doing?"

But he saw it there, hiding behind the years and the training and the fierce loyalty and protectiveness she felt for every one of them. He wondered distantly how she would handle this—whose side she would take, or if she could even bring herself to choose. She was a strong woman, but even she had her breaking point, an apex where loyalty and denial clashed and one emerged victor. And when it came down to it, Tony selfishly hoped she would choose Steve.

He hoped that they would all choose Steve.

If they all hated him for this... well, there was a certain validating comfort in that. Somehow, it would make all of this seem like the right choice.

Tony brushed her off; her concern and her presence and her very existence because everything had narrowed down into a moment, into now. And in the now, there was no Steve. Not anymore.

The metal faceplate slid over his vision, and he reached out with halting, staccato movements to punch the release beside the wide bay door. It screamed open with a howl of thin air and the groan of straining metal.

"Tony! Wait!" Natasha had to yell over the roar of the wind as the billionaire stepped up to the peeling yellow caution tape at the edge of the plane and looked impassively down into miles of nothing. "_Tony!_"

Tony didn't wait. Didn't answer, didn't even hesitate.

He stepped out of the plane and fell into the clouds.

**.**

Things had started falling apart the day before, just after arriving at the S.H.I.E.L.D. Hellicarrier with Steve, and he wasn't proud of the way he was treating the soldier but he no longer had any control over that. He was confused—maybe more so than he had ever been in his life, but he still knew with all certainty that the one favor he could do for his boyfriend at this point was to stay away from him.

So he did. And Steve probably hated him for it because god only knew that Tony hated himself for it.

In the end, that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was that Tony stood in his own self-destructive way for once in his life and made a choice. To protect the only person he really loved, even if that meant killing himself in the process.

Never one to leave a man to grieve in heartbroken peace, Nick Fury appeared at precisely the worst possible moment. He ambushed the billionaire as Tony was directing his pilot inside with the heavy metal cases that contained three different versions of his suit. The Mark IV, as usual, remained close at hand—in hand, in fact. Call it paranoia, but the suitcase was never far these days. As for directing such mundane details as the disposal of his gear, Tony had lit upon the method—chronic over-involvement in other people's work—as something that would hopefully keep his mind and emotions in check. Far from Steve.

"Mr. Stark, a word?"

Tony could have refused. Or he could have jumped right off the edge of the Hellicarrier and saved Fury the trouble of stripping his flesh from his bones with a can opener. Breathing a silent sigh of resignation, he followed the black-coated man into one of the ship's spacious ready rooms and let the door slide shut behind him.

Commander Fury wasted no time on pleasantries. Not even the compulsory how-do-you-do's or polite little platitudes of that nature. Though in retrospect, Tony might have been more surprised if he had eased his way into things.

"Mr. Stark," Fury intoned in a manner that suggested Tony was not going to enjoy this conversation at all, "would you care to enlighten me as to what the hell is going on between you and Captain Rogers?"

"I don't think you're legally entitled to that information," Tony quipped, and he knew it had been a bad move when Fury's one good eye narrowed angrily.

"You wanna run that by me again?"

Tony didn't.

"I'm gonna ask you one more time, and for your own sake you'd better be straight with me. Why is my soldier limping into battle like he just went twelve rounds with a bulldozer?"

"That, sir, would be one unfortunate bulldozer."

Tony was pushing his luck and he knew it, and he was quick to ease the tension he'd created. "What makes you think I had anything to do with it, anyway?"

Fury was not amused. "Mr. Stark, do I look like I was born yesterday? What you and Captain Rogers do with yourselves on your own time is none of my concern, and that's the way it should be. But if you have mistaken my good humor for ignorance then I may have to rethink my 'don't ask, don't tell' policy."

Tony clenched his jaw tight and turned his eyes away, every bone in his body aching for a fight.

"Allow me to make this simple for you. Is Rogers fit to go into battle?"

Unwillingly, the billionaire's mind flashed back to the unwelcome image of Steve's chest heaving for air, to the mess of torn flesh and blood that was his abdomen. For a brief moment, he thought he might be sick right then and there on Fury's flight deck.

"I think that's something Steve has to decide," he found himself saying, stalling in place of an honest answer because he didn't really have the guts to say _No, good god in heaven he should not be here or anywhere but in bed for a couple of weeks straight. No he's not fit to go into battle or even be standing upright and no he will never take himself out of the game because he's too goddamn __**good.**_

"I see." Fury clearly did _not_ see, but he was too smart to make a mountain out of a molehill. The man knew how to choose his battles, although he clearly wasn't done with Tony. Instead, he was quiet for a loaded moment, and then switched tactics. "I hope that's true, Tony. The government—this whole damn world—has put a lot of faith in me and my assets. And as we are both men of business, I presume that you know a little something about protecting your assets."

Tony glanced sharply over at Fury.

"You see, Captain Rogers is an asset. To this team, and to S.H.I.E.L.D.." Fury shrugged and turned his eyes briefly to the briefcase in Tony's hand. "One of our most valuable." His eyes moved upwards and he leveled a stern glare at Tony. "So tell me, Stark. Do I need to be worried about protecting my assets?"

Tony swallowed hard and turned away from Fury, towards the floor-to-ceiling glass panels that looked down on the clouds. Everything that was in him pulsed in anger; in righteous indignation that Fury dared to speak to him this way. About _Steve_, no less. It burned in his bones like a disease, aching for release.

But truthfully? As infuriating as the man could be... this time he might have had a point. Maybe he should be worried about protecting the soldier, because Tony clearly wasn't doing a very good job of that on his own. Maybe what it came down to was that Steve had no idea what was good for him, and even if Tony tried to kill him the soldier probably wouldn't lift a finger to protect himself.

Both men were silent, for too long. Words remained as lost, fleeting things, unable to bear the weight of what they felt. Of what needed to be said.

"There's nothing for you to be concerned about," Tony lied at last, and the words fell exactly as flat as they sounded. He wasn't fooling anyone. But he went through the motions, fed the facade. He tossed a terse smile and a nod Fury's way, and made a beeline for the door, needing to get out before the brittle air around him snapped.

"Tony?"

Tony stopped in the doorway, his self-control fraying at the edges, about to snap. He waited, but did not turn around.

"Sometimes, doing the right thing means making a sacrifice. A judgment call. A hard decision." Fury paused, and the silence was heavy. "But I guess I don't need to tell you that."

Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Either way, Tony wasn't willing to put up with this condescension nonsense for another moment.

"Thanks, Ghandi. I'll keep that in mind." The bitterness leaked from his voice, poisonous.

Tony left the deck without looking back.

**.**

He didn't think it would happen; never could have imagined it happening before. He would have laughed in the face of the man who predicted such a ridiculous thing.

But happen it did.

Over the course of the next several hours, Tony Stark came to agree with Nick Fury.

He might have thought himself suffering from some serious mental illness, but the truth was that this line of reasoning was one that had been running like a stream just beneath the surface of his subconsciousness for the past several days. Fury's words had simply pulled the thoughts out into the light... they had not created them.

Tony was a man of cold, hard data, information and analytical processes. And now it was time to face the facts. He'd known it all day, he supposed. But the words only formed, whole and terrible, in his mind the moment he stepped onto the plane and began an awkward, silent journey across the Atlantic ocean.

He was going to leave Steve.

Steve, beautiful, gentle, _good_ Steve. Steve whom he'd all but trapped into a messy, lie-strewn relationship. Steve whom he'd hurt so badly, damaged so severely. Steve who would never breathe a word about how miserable he'd become, because he would never acknowledge his own worth.

Steve, who loved him more than Tony loved himself. And considering what an infamous narcissist the billionaire was... that was a whole damn lot.

The soldier had been a beacon in Tony's spinning darkness, blessed warmth in the cold. He was something too pure to be real, too innocent to understand, and too honest to weather a man like Tony Stark without lasting damage. The billionaire had wounded something real and good, and the darkest part of himself insisted that there was no way Steve could recover from such a blow.

War couldn't do it; loss couldn't. All the worst of human cruelty and malice hadn't dented it. But Tony Stark, genius playboy billionaire, had managed to break Captain America's soul.

Steve would forgive him for that, Tony knew. The kid forgave anything, and where Tony was concerned that was doubly true. The billionaire could have walked up to him and shoved a knife into his gut, twisting, eyes to eyes. And with his dying breath, that goddamn moron of a hero would forgive him for it.

So perhaps it was a melodramatic example, but hadn't Stark done something almost as horrific already? Didn't he have the soldier's blood on his hands? Was it not his doing that the soldier languished now, fevered and weak, brought low by a wound Tony had inflicted? Beyond the physical, the billionaire had battered Steve's soul in the most unforgivable ways. He'd taken his heart, emotions and belief given in innocence, and trampled them. He'd spit on them, betrayed a trust so true and beautiful it was almost unreal.

Yes, Steve would forgive his lover anything.

But Tony would never forgive himself.

**.**

Almost the second Stark stepped out of the plane, careening away into the whistling canyon of empty air, things went all to hell.

Clint caught the soldier as Steve collapsed in on himself, seeming to become smaller as his body gave up the fight and consciousness fled. Natasha was shouting something at the pilot out in the passenger bay, Thor was insisting that everyone remain calm, which they were not, and alarms were sounding all over the aircraft. Apparently, doors weren't meant to open in midair and jettison a passenger out into space while they were cruising at thirty thousand feet.

Only Bruce seemed to keep his wits about him in the midst of the sudden chaos, and despite the cacophony ringing in their ears he heard Clint's desperate calls and made a beeline for the pair.

The archer had crumpled to the deck with Steve, holding on to him with a desperate strength that betrayed the near-panic coursing through his veins and _goddamn it_ he never should have let Steve come on the mission, never should have believed him when he said he was fine. He never should have let him go back to Tony, or speak to him or see him or any of this shit. It was all wrong, and someone like Steve should never have gone through this.

"Let go, Barton," Banner repeated, and Clint realized with a rush that the doctor was trying to pry his white-knuckled fingers out of the leather jacket around Steve's shoulders, trying to soothe him like a skittish child. "It's okay. I've got him."

It was the last thing Clint wanted to do, but he obeyed. He let go, his hands aching as he released his death-grip on the soldier and let Bruce ease the unconscious man into a more comfortable position. The doctor wasn't dumb enough to try to take him from the archer entirely, and maneuvered him so that his head was resting on Clint's thigh, his long limbs unfolded on the cold deck.

Somewhere just outside his sphere of focus, the plane had gone quiet again. The roar of the engines now seemed like a whisper outside as the doors closed, the sirens fell silent, and Thor resigned from his booming tones and instead murmured something under his breath in Nordic. Eventually, he and Nat made their way to the back of the plane, forming a broken half-circle around their teammates as they anxiously watched Bruce.

"What happened? What's wrong with him?" Natasha was the first to ask, and there was something comforting in the knowledge that they dreaded the answer almost as much as Clint did.

Bruce set his jaw, but despite the veneer of calm he appeared pale. "I was worried that something like this might happen," he said softly, almost to himself.

"Something like _what_? What's happening?" Clint demanded, his fingers twisting once again into the folds of Steve's jacket.

Bruce hesitated, as if unsure of how to explain a complex solution to someone who didn't speak his language. "The serum in his body is kicking into overdrive," he began slowly, "it knows that its been working on this wound too long."

"Isn't that a good thing?" Clint had the feeling that it wasn't. "Will it heal him?"

"He's out of energy, so to speak.. His body is at war with itself. It doesn't have the energy to keep his post-serum metabolism going at this rate and it's trying to remedy that by sapping its own resources... a sort of vicious circle. He doesn't have the energy to heal, and he can't heal because he doesn't have the energy."

Clint still didn't feel like he really understood this concept, but it was clear that Bruce was trying very hard to present it in child-like terms. He decided it didn't matter, ultimately, so long as the doctor could _do _something about it.

"How do we fix it?" He asked, watching the sweat that had beaded on Steve's brow trickle down the side of his forehead.

"There is something—" Bruce hesitated again, and this was never a good sign. "It's risky," he hedged.

"Riskier than letting his body destroy itself?"

"I can't make any promises."

Clint looked down again at Steve, took in the pain-furrowed brows and skin the color of death. At this point, he wasn't sure they could do any more to hurt Steve than his body was already doing to itself.

"I think we're running out of choices."

Thor, who had been eerily quiet up until this point, spoke up from behind Bruce. "I must agree, friend Banner. We owe it to our leader to do what is in our power."

Natasha, returning from the cockpit—Clint didn't recall that she had even left—cast a worried glance down at Steve. "We'll be reaching our landing zone in approximately four hours." She spoke to the group as it unsure who to direct the information towards; information that usually would have been received, processed, and digested by Steve. He would have known what to do in this situation, and such a realization seemed to hit home with all of them.

The simple truth was that they needed him more than any of them realized. Not until he was gone.

"Then we have four hours to figure this out," Clint tried to sound optimistic and failed miserably. "What do you need, Bruce?"

Banner was nodding to himself, features set in determination as he subconsciously pushed at his sleeves as if preparing for a battle. "I need you to keep him comfortable. Leave the rest to me."

This was something Clint thought he might be able to handle, and he nodded at Thor. Between the two of them—Thor, mostly—they were able to get Steve up as gently as possible and transfer him to one of the hard, green military cots that folded out of the side of the plane. It might have actually been meant as a shelf rather than a cot, but it would do in a pinch. Natasha brought them an extra jacket, folded neatly, for use as a makeshift pillow.

Something about the way that Steve settled, limp and completely unresponsive onto the cot nearly undid Clint. He'd never seen the soldier this way, never in his wildest dreams imagined that the strongest person he knew could be reduced to this. It was terrifying, quite frankly, and from the grim, sallow features of his teammates and the eerie silence that had settled onto the plane, he knew that they felt the same.

Lying before them, Steve looked like death warmed over. Even when Clint had pulled the blond, bleeding and delirious with pain out of Stark tower, he hadn't looked like this. His skin was now sallow, eye sockets sunken and shadowed. He was a ghost in a leather jacket. A boy bleeding out on the deck.

Clint swallowed his senseless fear.

Bruce had retreated to the corner where their sparse gear had been stowed, returning minutes later with two bulky hard cases of military grade who-knew-what. These he brought over to the cot next to Steve, laying them out on the metal grid floor and setting up an IV line. Why he had this kind of equipment with him or how he had procured it Clint couldn't imagine. He was simply glad that he'd had the foresight the rest of them apparently lacked.

The archer watched, shoulders rigid, as Bruce carefully peeled away the blood-soaked bandages and impassively studied the torn, bleeding skin beneath. Clint looked away as his stomach turned, fury burning through his veins. The silence, the soft brush of fabric against fabric became too much to handle.

"Talk to me, doc," Clint insisted, no longer caring that he might not understand half of what Bruce said.

He needed to hear it; needed someone to assure him that this was under control. Because with the sheer amount of blood, with the deathly pallor of Steve's skin and the intense heat that seemed to be rolling off his body in waves... Clint couldn't swear that he had a whole lot of confidence that the soldier would pull through this.

"Ah," Bruce stalled, biting his lip as he maneuvered a long, silver needle into the soldier's arm. It slid beneath the skin with deceptive ease, and the scientist immediately dabbed over the entry wound with a clear, gel-like substance.

Clint wanted to worry and fuss, ask the doctor what that stuff was, if it was meant to counteract the soldier's enhanced healing ability and keep the wound from closing up around the foreign object. But he refrained, if only barely. If anyone knew the serum, the ins-and-outs of what pumped through Steve's veins, it was Bruce. He'd spent the last several months running tests and labwork on the soldier's blood, deconstructing and processing the elements that a dozen other countries had been struggling to duplicate for years.

"We managed to replicate the serum, Tony and I," Bruce admitted at last, his voice low as if subconsciously protecting the information from outside ears. Even his eyes darted up, across the cargo bay, as if he'd spent so long and focused so intensely on keeping this information private that it was second nature now.

"The super soldier serum," he clarified, an addendum Clint found altogether unnecessary. "We managed to isolate the regenerative particles and develop something—purely experimental, you understand—that we thought might... well, the potassium levels fluctuate, but it's shown promise—more than we've seen before, and of course it's not a perfect formula—"

Clint held up a hand, his patience dangling by a thin thread. "You cooked something up in that high-tech lab. I get it. What does it _do_, Bruce?"

Bruce looked properly contrite, and even allowed himself an abashed sort of half-smile as he shook his head at himself. "Of course," he muttered at first, and then nodded as he reached forward and brushed a sweat-soaked strand of hair away from Steve's face. It was a gesture alien to him, but touching in its own awkward way.

"Bruce," Clint pushed, watching the dark-haired man carefully.

"It's not really a serum—the super soldier serum." This time, Clint didn't bother getting hung up on the re-iteration. "It's actually a series of process in which the red-blood cells are bombarded with rays—much like gamma rays—that is, it's _processes_. Not one. Several. And we've been recreating one of them."

"Which is?"

Here, Bruce hesitated, and Clint got the feeling that it was because he didn't want to relay the information more than that he didn't know how to. "There is an element in his blood that allows the human body to push itself—beyond the limits set by pain, exhaustion, sickness, tissue damage, muscle breakdown."

That wasn't what Clint had been expecting to hear; hoping to hear. He'd been wanting to hear something about the regenerative qualities he knew the soldier possessed. He was hoping Bruce might have some kind of magical trick up his sleeve, a colorful little vial he could inject into the soldier's prone body to revive him, kick-start his metabolism, bring him back to the Captain they knew and loved and needed.

"Wait—so it won't heal him?"

Bruce looked apologetic. "No."

"Then it will...?"

Bruce looked even more regretful. "Allow him to push past the limits. To overcome the fever that is shutting his body down."

Clint couldn't figure out why this still didn't sound like a good thing for Steve. "You're talking in riddles, Bruce. Be straight with me."

Bruce's expression darkened. "A small dose of this stuff will pull his body out of it's comatose state and give him the juice to start making the repairs it needs to," he oversimplified, much to Clint's relief. "Maybe even get him on his feet, if only barely. But if we need to... that is if it comes down to that... we can up the dose."

"What will that do?" Clint had the feeling he wasn't going to like the answer to that question.

Bruce's carefully blank expression confirmed that suspicion. "He'll be able to function," he answered gravely, quietly. He said no more, and Clint's stomach was surging to the point where he didn't feel up to asking. His overactive, slightly-paranoid mind was more than willing to fill in those mental gaps for him.

"And... What will happen if we don't give him that stuff?" He asked quietly, nodding to the green liquid pumping sluggishly through the IV line and into Steve's arm.

Bruce smiled, a quick skittering expression that didn't stick around for long. "You saw it," he sighed, rubbing at the bridge of his nose as if he were suddenly too distracted to keep his eyes open. "He could have stayed like that for days until his body righted itself. And it would have. Eventually."

Time, it went without saying, was not on their side.

Steve, eyebrows pulling together in discomfort, moaned softly and twisted on the cot below them as if trying to escape some phantom pain. Clint quickly reached out for his arm, hoping to impart some kind of physical comfort.

"At this rate, how long until his fever breaks?" Natasha asked softly from over his shoulder, and again Clint had forgotten that she and Thor were even present.

Bruce shook his head and narrowed his eyes at the numbered readouts on the screen of his machine. "There's no way to say," he murmured regretfully. "Hopefully? Not long."

"I will pray," Thor volunteered solemnly.

"You do that, big guy," Bruce nodded, helping Clint press the soldier back to safety as another fevered chill wracked through his body, causing him to spasm in pain. "He could use all the help he can get right now."

**.**

He was agonizingly, unbearably cold.

But what else was new? He'd been cold since the day they'd pulled him out of the ice, "rescued him" as they put it. But they didn't know; they couldn't know that it was too late for Steve Rogers to be rescued by anybody. They didn't know that the ice had already settled in his bones. That it still churned sluggishly through his veins, wrapped around his heart and squeezed to remind him that he still belonged to the arctic ice caps and sub-zero temperatures... the kind of utterly silent, frosted-breath hell that could kill an ordinary man in minutes.

_You are mine, _it whispered to him at night. _ You belong here,_ it soothed. _In the cold. In the dark. _

S.H.I.E.L.D. asked him how he was at his bi-monthly physicals, quizzed him at reviews, tested him with their beeping machines and endless indecipherable numbers. He gave them their answers and they watched their screens and they all did what was expected of them. But they still didn't know.

The world lurched uncomfortably before his vision, and he didn't understand how dark it had been until color and light flooded back, blinding, into his world. It was disorienting and strange, comforting and familiar. He returned to Brooklyn, where he had been born, shaped, molded. He returned to the aching pain of a broken heart and the stoic, dismal hope of a far-off battlefield.

"Come back," he rasped as memories flashed.

"Who's he talking to?"

His mother eyes, soft and sad and worn. Her perpetual expression of hard-won bravery, permanent since the day the Army officers had shown up on the steps with a folded flag and a yellow envelope and their deepest condolences, ma'am. Her eyes were blue.

Words caught in his throat, freezing there like the grains of time that formed this ghostly picture. He stared up into the image, mesmerized, afraid to even breathe lest the vision fade.

"Mom," he choked out, "s'that you?"

"That's not good," a disembodied female voice came up out of the darkness, but it wasn't _her_ voice so it didn't matter.

"It's the fever talking," another voice replied. This one was warm and comforting, deeper, and familiar in a way that tickled at the back of his mind. "It's spiked four degrees. He's hallucinating."

"Shit. Can we bring it down?"

"We're going to have to."

"I'm sorry," the words tumbled out past dry lips and a tongue too heavy to form the syllables. Disappointment, crushing and cold, fell out of her eyes.

"It's alright, Steve." Her voice was not her own, and yet it was. Worn like her eyes, like the smile she never smiled anymore. Worn with worry for _him _now that he was all she had_,_ and he tried to banish that look from her face most days but there were times that he didn't have that power.

"I'm looking," he pleaded, though he knew not to whom. "I'm trying," he begged, though he didn't know what that meant.

"Sh, shh..." A cool hand on his forehead left his eyes fluttering closed, and the acceptance in the soft sound was staggering. "I know, Steve. You always try so hard."

"I found another job," he gushed, mumbling around uncooperative lips, desperate to ease the heartache in her eyes, veiled—but she couldn't hide it from him, not any more than he could hide the bruises from her. "On the docks, and it's good pay and I know I can _do_ this—"

"Steve, it's okay," she sounded more worried this time, more stressed and tense.

"I'll take care of you..." he promised, watching with alarming detachment as the edges of his vision faded.

He made a point not to say anything when he came home at night, exhausted and aching, and found that her pill bottles were lighter than they had been that morning. And in return, she didn't say anything about the swollen eyes and split lips. And she never had, not since he was young.

He worried constantly that she was ashamed of him. Not least because he was ashamed of himself.

He didn't know how to pick his fights, didn't know when _not_ swinging was the best swing. Even when they ambushed him on his own steps, dragging him kicking and spitting into the narrow alleyway through which he took out the garbage every night. Even when they held him against the bricks and broke his nose and cracked his ribs, let him collapse, gasping into the filth and stagnant rainwater.

He never quit. Never stopped swinging.

And when he limped inside, drenched in filth and bleeding, his mother just smiled tiredly at him and reached into the freezer for an ice pack. In that moment, he thought that maybe his heart broke. That he had ever subjected her to this: a son of whom she could not be proud; a son too small and weak to wear the colors of a country fighting for their freedom while they waited at home and listened to the radio—it was too much to bear.

He walked out the door, dripping and bloodstained, and headed for the nearest recruitment office. Their rejection was the fourteenth one, but it wasn't the last.

That week, she put on her nurse's uniform, dropped the house keys into his palm, and kissed him on the forehead. He was fourteen years old when she left for a war that was his to fight.

She never came back.

**.**

It had been two hours since the soldier's raging fever had broken and the hallucinations had eased up enough to let him slip into a troubled catatonia.

Clint sat in the back of the plane at Steve's side, his hands clasped and his elbows on his knees. He stared down at the aluminum treadplate beneath his boots, just listening to the roar of the engines outside, a sound you so quickly grew accustomed to after eighteen hours in a sealed metal container. Now, he reached for that sound, grasped and held onto it. It was the only thing that stood a chance at deafening the insanity roaring in his own mind.

His right arm brushed the cot where Steve lay, now blessedly still and silent after hours of tossing, soaked in sweat, moaning and writhing and battling jumbled hallucinations. Clint shuddered at the memory. He felt he'd learned more about the soldier in those two hours of unguarded illness than he had over the past several years of knowing him. It was a hard wake-up call. He'd instructed the others not to tell Steve what he'd been saying while he lay senseless, ravished with fever. He hadn't really needed to ask. They would never breathe a word.

Now that the soldier was steady and stable enough not to pull it out with his ceaseless tossing, a strange-looking machine was hooked to the IV in Steve's arm, displaying statistics in numbers and strange little lines that meant nothing to the archer. Only Bruce understood those numbers and lines, and thank god someone did.

They were now less than an hour from their landing zone, and Bruce had retired to the front of the plane, looking exhausted, to try and catch a few winks. He hadn't slept at all since they'd taken off, and it really hadn't started to show until he'd gone to work on Steve. He looked a good ten years older when he was at work on the captain—and damned if Clint would ever forget that first night, when he'd looked over at the doctor elbow-deep in the soldier's bright red blood and realized how much Bruce cared. About all of them.

But like the rest of the team, the unassuming scientist reserved a special place in his heart for this soldier, a starry-eyed muscle-bound, man out of time, a lanky boy who would rather throw himself in front of a bullet than try to work a laptop.

Maybe it was superstition, or the fact that despite the differences in their generations, they all felt older than the solemn blond who took his job so seriously. But despite his old soul, there was something beautifully pure about Steve, something real and innocent like the child in all of them—something that they felt the instinctive need to protect. To preserve that belief in humankind, in goodness and god and a light at the end of the tunnel... it came second nature to them, like breathing.

Steve protected them all. They must protect Steve.

Well... there was certainly one member of their dysfunctional little group that didn't seem to subscribe to that theory.

Just thinking about Stark made something boil up inside Clint, deep and hot and ugly like a geyser rushing to blow. It was a fount that had been bubbling for so long that controlling it was no longer realistic; that kind of bitterness and ire was sure to leak out sooner or later.

"You know, you were always too good for him," the archer found himself saying out loud.

He felt immediately guilty, checking the canvas partition over his shoulder and then the soldier's shuttered lids for any sign he'd been overheard. Steve dozed on, oblivious, and Clint breathed out a long sigh of relief and resignation.

"You still are," he went on, his voice low and confidential and a little bit guilty. But he'd never said of this out loud and letting it out now felt like admitting to a crime: incriminating and exhilarating all at once.

But once the dam had cracked, the floodwaters were quick to come rushing through.

"You're too damn good for any of us, and you're so oblivious that we tend to forget. We forget that you're the purest thing we've got, that you're what holds us and shapes us and makes us work..."

He trailed off, his eyes fixed unseeingly on the heavy double latch on the bay doors across the empty space. Time and space held him there, unblinking, his thoughts drifting in limbo like leaves on the surface of still water.

He shook himself, and turned his head with what felt like great effort to look down at Steve. Looking straight at him like this—a habit he tended to avoid when they were both conscious—was almost physically painful. Taking in every detail, from the slightest hint of premature lines on the pale skin above his eyebrows to the gentle golden sweep of hair across the his forehead. The line of a well-defined cheekbone, the way honey-colored lashes rested on his cheek, hiding eyes the color of sky.

Horrified by his thoughts—usually so constrained and hidden—the archer started. He rocked forward, up out of his chair, steadying on the balls of his feet, and breathing was suddenly difficult. He moved across the too-small space, his boots barely audible on the metal plating over the sound of the engines. He shuddered; huffed out a controlled breath; worked at the hem of his plain black t-shirt in a futile attempt to center himself.

"Why _Tony_?" He choked out, and was horrified to find that he felt impossibly _angry. _"What does he have—what can he give you—that I can't? God knows you don't give a damn about the money... You don't even know what to do with it. So what is it, huh? He treats you like shit, you know. He always has, and we all see it and we don't say anything because we want you to be happy, want to give you your space."

He closed his eyes for a moment and paused where he stood, mere feet from the soldier, and made a valiant effort to calm himself down.

"He's brash and arrogant. Selfish. He doesn't care about anyone but himself, doesn't think of you at all. Doesn't care how he hurts you, and I see it even if you won't. Every day, he's hurting you. Ripping you to fucking shreds."

Deflated and spent, Clint sank back down onto the crate where he'd been sitting earlier. Now that he'd vented, however, briefly, he felt a little ashamed of himself. Ashamed that he'd unloaded his heart into the silence, even if no-one had heard. It was something he'd never intended to do; a burden he'd always planned to bear alone.

Steve slumbered on, pale and barely moving with the motion of his own breath. And he was still safely asleep, which was good, because it meant he hadn't heard a word.

At the same time, it was all wrong... because he hadn't heard a word.

Coughing out a laughing, mirthless breath, Clint leaned close to the soldier, just watching him with hurting eyes.

"Goddamn it Steve. I'm_ right here_."

Silence pulled the fight out of him, drained the angry tenseness from his lips. His eyelids fluttered, sliding shut, and he let his forehead fall forward to rest against the side of Steve's head. That golden hair was intoxicatingly soft against his skin, the soldier's smell maddening.

"I'm right here," he repeated in a whisper.

The plane roared around him, and the soldier slept on.

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So... this was a long one. I couldn't bring myself to chop it down; I kind of wanted to jump into the action next chapter. So happy birthday, lovelies.

On a more relevant note... I could not believe the emotional response I got out of chapter ten! I don't know if I'm more regretful or elated that I was able to pull on your heartstrings like that... I promise to start patching things up shortly and thereby (hopefully) start alleviating the emotional angst of so many of my readers. Thank you for your beautiful reviews! I offer you a communal box of tissues as thanks for your tearful responses. That and promises to make it all better soon.

Next chapter: More Tony POV, we meet the Kree at last, and... an unexpected twist? Yes siree.

**.**

Big thanks to: **Alerix Slynn**, **An Assassin's Angel**, **nsomniacartist**, **totellThetruth**, **Alia Sukai**, **scarletfever91**, **GRock87**, **EvilGeniusBookworm13**, **Clack-WWBM-Lover**, **vampyfreak**, **creaturecomfort**, **Steph5756lovestwilight**, **Infinitechange**, **pfnck**, **Kurosaki224**, and **OrchidoOfAkyre**.

Thank also to:

**TheDreamerLady**: Would you believe me if I told you that reading your review made me laugh? Like, out loud to myself in the middle of the night in my apartment like a crazy person? Cause it did. Especially the part about Tony having to consult with at least six people before doing anything—a concept with which, by the way, I completely agree. Hope you enjoy this chapter, and thanks so much for reading!

**Yuu-chi**: Forgive me for both causing you extreme emotional anguish and for the sub-par quality of the last chapter. Even so, I'm thrilled you enjoyed this one. Thank you so much for sticking around, and keep reading! Things will get better someday for these boys of ours. :)

**Harry Draco Malfoy**: Oh noooo haha. I hope this was a fast enough update for you? Not my fastest ever but I tried to give you a good long one this time. :)

**fangirl29**: Have fun on your vacation! Which island are you visiting? I bummed around Kona for a while so I'm definitely a little jealous. Ah well, I guess I'll have to pacify myself with writing more Avengers fanficiton. X) I'm so glad you've been enjoying it... if experiencing such serious emotional angst can be considered enjoyment? Ha. Thank you so much for your support, love~

**Nilly's Issue**: Oh, a fellow Steve abuser? I'm going to have to go and poke about in your stories, it's so rare/difficult to find another devoted Steve!whumper on this site for some reason. I know how you feel, though: even as I write I'm pulling for Clint, despite knowing how all of this will end up. It's so odd because he was never meant to play such a large part in this story. He really just wrote himself in; it was fate. Thanks for your lovely review! I'll have to return the favor sometime soon~!

**Harlie Rayne**: I'm honored to hear that! As an author that is high praise indeed. :) I hope you enjoy a very brief peek into Tony's psyche this chapter—I promise there is much more to come. Thanks for reviewing!

**GrimmXEchelon**: Ah yes, Fury know much more about what is going on than anyone really gives him credit for... And I'm sorry for causing you such emotional distress, I really had no idea everyone would react this way! (Does it make me evil that I kind of love it, though?) Anyway, stick around! I promise (Still) that things will begin to look up eventually.

**Lazysundayz**: *bows* I'm so honored and maybe more than a lot flattered by all your wonderful praise... I'm certainly not sure that I deserve it all, but it certainly warms and inspires me. Thank you so much for your immensely encouraging feedback and support—it really does make a huge difference to me. :D More chapters just for you!

**Luna S. Renaldi**: AHHH Batman, my all-time favorite superhero. How did you like the movie? I saw it three times in the first 48 hours it came out. I felt like my movie-going experience was forever altered after watching it. Anyway, enough of that... thanks for reviewing! I appreciate it muchly!

**PartyInTheBackBusinessUpFron t**: I love hearing that I can hook non-slash fans... that's pretty much one of the best compliments ever. I was never a slash fan myself either, and it took me a very long time to warm up to the genre. I came t the conclusion that I liked slash stories that were done right and not pure smut. So... hopefully I can produce something of that caliber for others like me to enjoy. Thanks so much for your feedback!

**xfailingxhearbeatx**: Ah, you make-a-me blush. :) I hope you come to understand Tony's POV a little bit more over this and the next couple of chapters... he really is a stubborn ass, but he means well. Thank you so much for your kindness and support~

: Thank you! You're too kind... and reviews such as yours make me a complete fiction whore, pumping out new chapters to hear what everyone thought and how they reacted to things. I know, I know, I'm horrible... but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop! More chapters just for you! Thanks so much for leaving your feedback, it really does mean the world to me. :)

**Guest**: I understand your sentiments completely. Even as I write I find myself experiencing just such moral and ethical dilemmas dealing with the actions of Steve and Tony both. But when I started writing, the story was exactly that: a therapeutic outlet into which I channeled my current relationship, which is a toned-down version of Steve and Tony's at times. I think there is a lot of pain and anger and messy crap in every relationship, and very few people are willing to examine it... or to consider the implications of the beauty that can come out of so much ugliness. I hope that you continue to read, even if the story is a little unconventional for your tastes. Thank you so much for your feedback. :)

**npeg**: Awwww don't cry! I'll fix things soon, I promise! At least, mostly... sort of... well, you'll have to stick around to see what I mean. Thank you so much for reading!

**Bakura From School**: Whew! Thank you so much, I don't even know where to begin... I'm honored to be your introduction the fandom, and elated that you can sympathize so well with all of our boys. I hope continued chapters live up to your expectations. Many loves in return!

**Wicked Neko**: Agh! It seems that I made a lot of people cry with that last chapter... which was totally not my intention, but I'll take it as a compliment...? Either way, thank you so much for taking the time to read and for your lovely reviews. Stick around, things will start to look up soon. :)

**Fleur**: I would never laugh at you: besides, you are not alone. I have apparently completely wrecked the wolrds of about half the population of FF-net with that last chapter, and I didn't even mean to. Here's an update and a tissue while you wait for me to fix everything. It will happen eventually! Promise!

**TheBoyWhoLivedIsDead**: First off: AWESOME username. I wish I had thought of it first. Second off, does this chapter answer your question? ;) Thanks you so much for reading, you rock.


	12. Disconnect

**.**

**C12: Disconnect**

**.**

Tony fell.

He relished in that moment of gut-clenching weightlessness, held on to the exhilarating sensation of becoming a flimsy vessel on a powerful ocean. The air currents at these heights were strong enough to yank him away from the plane, down through the stratosphere at teeth-rattling speeds. He waited until the last moment to heed the steadily increasing beeping in his heads-up display and power on the suit's exterior systems.

The boosters caught, firing with a force that had once been enough to grind Tony's joints in their sockets, spinning his limbs out of control as he fought against the torque of unfamiliar power. Now his legs wavered only slightly as his muscles contracted, stabilizing his body in midair. He had the control and technique to wear the armor. He had the right, he defended to the world, a claim he was called to prove on a daily basis.

Problem was that some days, he didn't think he even had the right to wear his own skin, to count himself a member of the human race. Some days, he thought that maybe he was no better than the oppressors he fought against.

Roaring his anger into the whistling air, Tony glued his arms to his sides and powered his boosters up to maximum capacity. He shot away into the clouds, rocketing towards the earth at a speed that rivaled that of a supersonic jet. The G-force was enough to send his stomach plummeting down to his toes as Jarvis beeped at him in alarm, but he didn't slow down. Not until he broke through the clouds miles above Nepal and made a sharp, angled line for their target.

He touched down several miles away from their charted landing zone. And by touched down, what he meant was that he slammed into the earth with enough repercussive force to send tremors through the soil that could be felt by anyone within miles. He left a crater the size of a house and a deep indentation where his right fist had landed in front of his knee to brace his landing.

He lifted his hand slowly out of the earth, unfolding his armored fingers and watching the clumps of soil and debris fall away from his armor.

Tony lifted his fist and slammed it back into the bedrock.

Once, twice, a dozen times. He pummeled the granite beneath him until it had been ground down into shards and bits of debris and dust, decimated. It wasn't half as satisfying as he thought it would be.

He was breathing raggedly, pulling long gasps of air in through tortured lungs, sobbing. He was aching with anger and the need to release it, pulsing with his own hatred for himself. He'd never felt more helpless, more at odds with who he was and what he had done.

He was Tony Stark, and he made a rule of living without regrets.

So who was this man pounding away inside his skull, this spineless coward who suddenly realized that he regretted _everything?_ He didn't recognize that man. He didn't recognize who he'd become, and he wasn't sure when it had started but something inside of himself had _changed._ Something had shifted irreparably and he didn't like it, didn't want it.

He didn't want to be Tony Stark, the asshole who smiled for the cameras and flaunted his wealth and intellect. He didn't want to be the man who hated himself more than the world could possibly hate him, who threw himself with complete abandon into everything he did just so he wouldn't have time to stop and think. He didn't want to be the Avenger who stirred up trouble or took his teammates for granted... or hurt the people he cared about the most.

And yet, the fact remained that two days ago he'd woken up in the morning and chosen _not_ to reach out to Steve. He'd had every opportunity to walk over to his boyfriend and pull him into his arms—a moment that seemed so impossibly distant now that it made his heart ache. He could have kissed him on the forehead and murmured a good morning. He could have smiled, could have invited Steve along with he and Pepper for the day. He could have done a thousand and one things to show Steve that he cared, to make it clear that the soldier was the one he wanted by his side every second that he was awake.

He'd had so many opportunities, and he'd watched every damn one slip by him. He'd done nothing at all.

And now? Now the opportunity to fix this.. any of it, was beyond his reach. He'd closed the door between he and Steve, perhaps forever, and he thought it would be the right thing to do for the soldier's sake but it hurt to realize that it hadn't actually changed _anything_.

It didn't change how utterly and completely he loathed himself.

Never before had he experienced such crushing defeat, never been driven so far as to wish he could go back in time and undo his actions. Rewind the tape, so to speak. Take it all back.

Damn the moment he'd first kissed Steve. He should have walked away and saved the soldier all of it.

Selfishly, he wanted to save himself from it, too.

Tony gasped out a labored breath, straightening, taking stock of his surroundings. A strange haze had descended upon his mind, his vision, clouding his thoughts and vision. He felt that he existed in a body that was not his own, like a puppet-master moving someone else's limbs.

These were not his hands. This was not his suit. This was not his life.

**.**

Awareness arrived quickly, like a light switch flicking on. Like opening the pages of a familiar novel and becoming instantly immersed in the story, a figure in the thick of the action who has not yet caught up with his surroundings, but must still participate in them. Must still move forward, even while the details remained vague.

Vague was possibly the wrong word for this, Steve thought to himself as he blinked.

He was sitting up, he understood, and for some reason this fact struck him as strange. Unfamiliar, as if it was something he hadn't done in a long time.

He blinked several times to clear his vision, dull and white like the breath-fogged glass of a windshield. The low murmur permeating his senses broke and fell apart into words, but they were unclear too. Everything around him was distant; his body weightless.

He was underwater, he concluded slowly. It was the only explanation.

"Steve," a garbled voice was calling. "Come on, big guy. Come on. Right here."

"Bruce," he acknowledged against his will, his tongue thick and unfamiliar in his mouth.

"Good man," the relief was evident in the tone and in the worried brown eyes that slowly materialized before his uncooperative vision.

Mesmerized by the floating sensation that seemed to have enveloped his mind, the soldier lifted one lightly trembling hand, and found himself strangely unperturbed by the fact that he could scarcely feel his fingers. He felt no more attachment to the limb than if it had belonged to someone else. Even when he flexed each digit experimentally, forming a loose fist, he could barely register the change.

"How are you feeling?" Bruce manged to sound impressively level.

It was too bad his eyes said it all.

"Fine," Steve answered hollowly, momentarily stunned to discover that it wasn't exactly a lie. He felt fine. He felt fine. Not great, but... not much else, either. Not anything.

"Do you remember where you are?"

"Plane," he monotoned, again as if someone else were controlling his voice, moving his lips, forming the syllables. The recognition of this fact, too, came through his subconscious senses. His mind had recognized the familiar roar of the engines before his awareness caught up and fed the information to his lips; he had as much conscious part in voicing the words as any bystander.

"He seems lucid," a female voice observed clinically. "I have to hand it to you, Bruce. You pulled through. This might have worked."

"Yeah, well... He's not out of the woods just yet."

"What do you remember?" A black-clad figure shouldered the doctor out of the way to crouch directly in front of Steve, strong hands coming to grip the soldier's forearms. "Do you remember the briefing this morning? Anything after?"

The questions seemed to come too quickly and Steve's senses reeled. He'd never been drunk (go figure) but he'd always imagined that it would feel exactly like this.

"Take it easy, Barton," Bruce scolded gently. "Give him a few minutes. He still seems a little disoriented."

"He should be," remarked the female voice again, and she was promptly ignored. _Natasha. _He knew her, could recognize her name. Somehow, this seemed like progress.

"He shows marked improvement," a deeper voice intoned in something like approving surprise. He couldn't see the speaker, and oddly, he didn't feel the need to seek out the source of the voice. "Your healing skills are a true wonder, friend Bruce."

"I wouldn't call it healing," the doctor sighed, and Steve wondered if he was the only one who heard the unacknowledged concern, a deep, nameless worry, lurking beneath the surface of his words. "But... then again, I don't know if I'd call it anything else either. Bless the day science fiction became our form of medicine..."

"Steve," the kneeling figure shook him gently, pulling his wandering focus back to those strangely mesmerizing green eyes. "Say something."

"Clint," the soldier breathed, and could only distantly wonder why he seemed so detached from his body... and his intelligence, apparently, if his inability to form anything more coherent than monosyllables was any indication. "What happened?"

The archer's face fell, though he made a visible effort to regain his composure. Even in his current state of mind, floating in slow, lazy orbits around his own awareness like a satellite around the earth, Steve couldn't miss it.

"Steve... I—"

"You were injured," Natasha saved him the awkward explanation, and again Steve did not miss the look of finality she shot around the gathered circle, daring them to contradict her. If he'd been more himself, her defensive attitude would have worried him. "Let's leave it at that for now. Bruce managed to get something patched together for you."

"It'll get you back on your feet, but you really need to take it easy, Cap." Bruce added. "Just because you're... conscious, to stretch the definition of the word... doesn't mean you're back at full capacity. You're running on empty and you need to avoid pushing yourself."

"At _all_," Clint insisted, the stress heavy in his voice.

"I missed something," he spoke sluggishly again before his mind caught up, his subconscious probing relentlessly for an elusive truth. Even as the words rolled off his tongue, he knew it was true. He was missing something vital, something important. He dragged his gaze around the semi-circle that had formed in the cramped space around his cot.

It hit him, and he could not spare the moment to wonder if he should ask at all.

"Where's Tony?"

Quiet descended upon the cargo bay like a heavy hand, thick and oppressive. Thor looked up at Bruce, and the doctor wouldn't meet his gaze. Clint's jaw worked in that telling way that spoke of unadulterated fury, and Natasha's chin came up a fraction of an inch.

Something was terribly wrong... and for the life of him, Steve couldn't remember what it was.

"Where's—" he tried again.

Natasha cut him off, that strange finality back in her voice; a silent warning accompanied it. "He's not here, Steve. It doesn't matter right now. Do you remember the mission?"

_The mission._

"The Kree..." He fumbled, feeling his brows pull together in confusion. He had a feeling that this strange physical disassociation should bother him a lot more than it did at present.

"Well that's something," Bruce mumbled, moving out of sight to the sound of cases closing and metal tools being shuffled together. Steve got the impression that he was glad to find something with which to busy his hands, something to take him away from the awkwardness of the questions and glances and unsaid words.

"We're minutes from our landing zone, Steve," Clint seemed inordinately worried as he searched Steve's face for he knew-not-what. "We need to be sure you're up for this."

"Up for what?"

"For standing there and looking pretty," Bruce, returning to his side; tried to say it with a smile. The concern in his eyes was too heavy, too real, and quickly pulled the expression away. "You're cleared to stand and speak and not much else. Got it? No heroics, Cap."

"You hear that? Doctor's orders." Clint tried to smile too, and he was marginally more successful.

Answering either of them didn't seem terribly important at the moment, so instead Steve tried to stand up.

From the immediate alarm this generated in the faces and voice surrounding him, he guessed that this was not something they had expected.

"What the hell are you doing?" Clint tried to push him back down, the quickest to regain his composure, and Steve was unsurprised to find that now he had the strength to resist.

The soldier wavered a little as he regained his feet, blinking dumbly down at his boots. For the life of him, he couldn't seem to connect his mind to his body. He remembered the pain of yesterday, and decided that this was a good thing.

"I'm fine," he tried to say, but his voice was lost in the din.

"You're going to tear your stitches—"

"Shall I restrain him? I shall restrain him."

"Everyone, just calm down!"

"We need to get that IV out—"

"Just take it easy, Steve—"

"I'm fine," He said again with strength, and this time he managed to raise his voice enough to startle at least Clint and Bruce into silence. Thor continued to loudly volunteer his services to restrain the soldier, but no-one seemed to be seriously considering that option any more.

"Steve, listen up." Bruce took Steve's shoulders gently. "You may think that you feel fine right now, but that's the serum talking. Do you understand?"

Steve didn't, but he nodded anyway, because that seemed to be what was expected of him.

Thankfully, Bruce didn't take the soldier at face value. "I get it, you feel invincible right now. But if you don't take it slow... you'll crash again. And I won't be able to fix it this time, you got me?"

"I can't feel anything," the soldier mumbled mildly, trying again to remind his body that he was indeed the owner of these uncooperative limbs, the one who controlled his lightly shaking fingers. With the pain, however, seemed to have gone every other human sensation.

"I know, I know," Bruce soothed, gently pressing the soldier's arm back to his side. "Now sit down, and try to just... not hurt yourself."

Aware that he was being treated like a child, and as was becoming the norm, unable to really care, Steve mechanically sat back down on the cot. He was conscious of a strange, dry clamminess to his skin that should have been vaguely uncomfortable. He remembered feeling like he was frozen and on fire at the same time; he recalled distant snatches of old remembrances mixed with new. And yet, it was Tony from whom his mind seemed to shy, as if unwilling to fill in the blanks in his memory.

Turning sluggishly to Clint, who was the only one had not left the cargo bay by now, he stared at him for a long moment.

"What happened?" He had to ask, his voice hoarse with disuse.

Clint swallowed once, but otherwise bravely retained his poker face. He didn't lie. He didn't answer.

For some reason, that was more telling than any false platitude could have been.

Something was very wrong.

Feeling drained for reasons he couldn't have explained, Steve allowed his head to fall back against the curved bulkhead behind him. He pressed his hand to his side and was pleased to find that the light pressure ignited no pain. It was a welcome change.

"It'll come back to you, Steve." The archer's voice was closer now, and the cot shifted as Clint sat down beside him. "But you might wish it hadn't."

It was Steve's turn to swallow, his eyes burning as he stared up at the shadowed recesses of the plane above him.

The natural defenses of his mind told him it was true. As he turned his awareness in that direction, hesitant and searching, it was as if his own consciousness were shielding him from the truth, rebuffing his questioning thoughts, throwing up a barricade of warning blankness. There was a reason the last few minutes of awareness were hidden from him, he knew.

Whatever had happened between he and Tony... all that he remembered of it now was blinding pain.

**.**

Thirty-eight minutes later, the plane touched back onto solid ground with a crunch of shifting gravel and a long, low whine as the engines powered down.

Clint watched from the tall, narrow porthole windows as the wind that had stirred up the debris and dust in the environment slowly subsided, allowing a clearer view of their landing site. He clenched his jaw as he spotted Tony. The Iron Man suit waited for them, standing mere yards away from the wing as the plane settled into the earth.

_Some nerve._

His intense hatred of the billionaire aside—a sentiment that had, seemingly impossibly, only increased in light of the week's events—they had an entirely separate slew of problems to deal with.

Namely, and Clint would be the first to admit to it, he was worried sick about Steve.

Turning discreetly, not that it really mattered at this point, the archer assured himself for the millionth time that the blond was still breathing.

The soldier sat where he had been directed to sit, perfectly still on the cot. That he had been lying on that same cot only hours ago, drenched in his own sweat and entertaining vivid hallucinations from seventy years ago didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. Or maybe he just didn't remember. Bruce had mentioned there might be some sporadic short-term memory lost associated with at least recent events, but it was hard to tell when the soldier was in this state.

The blond also seemed unaware of the dozen worried glances the archer was shooting him every minute or so, another trait very unlike Steve Rogers. On another day, the soldier wouldn't have hesitated to tease the archer—in his own understated way—for his "unwarranted" concern. And then he would try his damndest to appear like that concern really was unnecessary, whether or not he was falling apart at the seams.

It wasn't like that now, though... And that lack of awareness was what was bothering Clint the most.

All in all, he was beginning to get the very bad impression that maybe this whole get-Steve-put-back-together-again plan of Bruce's was going to backfire on them. If it hadn't already. For the last half-hour Steve had been eerily quiet, his piercing blue eyes glazed and distant. They would flicker occasionally, but only as if keeping up with a dream or a memory of some kind. Like he wasn't even really awake.

And who knew? Maybe he really had remembered everything by now. He hadn't said a word, and Clint certainly didn't have the heart to.

"You know if the assassin career track doesn't pan out, you could always go into babysitting."

Clint turned and allowed himself a smile for Nat's sake.

"How is he?" The redhead asked, nodding at the soldier as she stepped through the partition and closer to Clint.

"Hell if I know," Clint rubbed a hand roughly over his tired eyes. "He's been pretty quiet."

"Maybe that's a good thing."

Neither of them held out any hope that this was true, but they couldn't bring themselves to address that reality right now. Any thread of hope, however thin and implausible, seemed welcome.

"Fury wants an update," Natasha volunteered impassively after a moment of studying the soldier. Steve looked for all the world like he hadn't even noticed her entrance; no gentlemanly standing or nodding or inquiring after her health. Not even a flicker of blue eyes. Clint wondered if this was as worrying to her as it was to him.

"Great. What did you tell him?"

She looked up at him and smiled wryly. "That we landed."

Sighing heavily, the archer straightened and shook out his shoulder. "That's all he needs to know for now."

She nodded once, and seemed to hesitate.

"Clint?"

The archer looked up at her, met her beautiful eyes. He wished again that he could learn to love her.

"We need him."

Without question, it seemed that with the words she laid a heavy responsibility on his shoulders. To ensure that the soldier landed on his feet; that he was ready for the trials that awaited them.

"I know." He didn't bother to smile, or to say anything more. Natasha trusted Clint to hold together the man who held them all together, and it was a trust he would not betray.

She nodded once, breathed, seemed to center herself for a long moment. If she'd had any more to say, she clearly decided that it was better kept to herself, and wordlessly left the cargo bay.

Clint couldn't afford to speculate further. He turned back to Steve, and was more surprised than he should have been to find the soldier watching him, his eyes still too-bright, as if in fever, but blessedly alert.

"How're you feeling?" The archer queried unnecessarily, taken aback by the startlingly direct gaze.

"Fine," the soldier answered mechanically.

A chill ran up the archer's spine.

If Clint didn't know any better, he might've thought Steve was on some kind of severe depressant. Possibly even hungover. Considering all that he'd been through recently, though... even this bare functionality was a marked improvement.

"Well, we've landed." Clint wasn't sure where this awkwardness had come from, but he wasn't used to it and didn't care for it in the slightest. Maybe it had something to do with the way Steve was acting—like a completely different person, almost—but he suspected it was more than that.

It was the past year, it was the past week, it was everything combined. He was caught in the unenviable position between hatred of one man and intense love for another, and he wasn't sure what that meant for him. For them.

For the moment, however, he doubted Steve even remembered the last few minutes, let alone a year of complex history. This was certainly not the time to be digging it back up, if there was ever going to be a time.

Although impaired, Steve clearly read the unspoken request in the archer's words. He stood, slow and awkward, as if testing out an unfamiliar body. That didn't do anything for Clint's confidence in the current situation, but at least the soldier was on his feet, and staying there without any help.

That was a vast improvement, all things considered.

And yet, Clint couldn't shake the feeling that Bruce was worried about this; was worried that if Steve felt well enough to overexert himself, he might do irreparable damage to his already-fragile body. Maybe Clint didn't understand all the science of it exactly, but he'd _seen_ it, that concern in the doctor's eyes when Steve had woken up. He knew now that Banner harbored more concerns about this than he was letting on, but there wasn't much either of them could do about it.

All they had to do was make it through this without appearing weak... and even that wasn't looking good judging by the deathly pallor of the soldier's skin or the way he took halted, careful steps like a child just learning to walk.

"Please just stay on your feet," Clint sighed under his breath as he placed a steadying hand on the blonde's arm. Both the touch and the words went unheeded by the soldier, who took his time straightening to his full height and stepping towards the front of the plane.

Concern coiling in his chest, cold and sickening like an angry snake, Clint followed.

**.**

It didn't take long.

Steve had sat quietly where he'd been placed, and the floodgates of his memory cracked open a little wider with every minute that passed. He supposed it was the pain that had triggered it. That was back, too. Or maybe it had never been gone, and it had just taken his body and mind longer to acknowledge it.

It was funny, he philosophized as he clenched his jaw and focused on _not focusing on anything_, how humans always seemed destined to want exactly what they could not have.

He'd longed for memory and now that it was back, he just wanted it gone. And with it, all the pain.

It took him too long to come back to his senses, to cooperate when Clint urged him to his feet, to pretend he was still floating, blissful and docile, in the void left by his memories. He allowed the archer to touch him, to guide him, to help him. He didn't have the strength to push him away any more than he had the strength to face an army of invading aliens.

He was going to do it anyway.

Steve walked. Slow, clumsy, still feeling too far disconnected from his own limbs, but he made it. He made it through the plane, down the aisle, out the door. He made it through the ranks of his teammates, all watching him with concern, all trying to hide it with varying levels of success.

Iron Man stood where he had been standing when they landed, his faceplate firmly in place between he and the world. A pillar of iron and flesh in the rocky high-desert terrain, his gold and red sparking in the patches of sun light that played hide and seek with the clouds above.

Steve stared at the back of his helmet, feeling mesmerized, distant, incapable of the pain he should be feeling and incapable of feeling anything else.

_It's cold_, seemed to be the only rational conscious thought the solider could process. _It's so cold. _

The tension was palpable as the others made the short trip down the ramp and joined their teammate on the semi-frozen earth; the air crackled with the electricity of all that was not said. Tony did not acknowledge their arrival with anything more than his presence, and they had no words for him.

Even Steve felt empty, hollow and useless here. It had never been more important that he appear powerful. He'd never felt more powerless in his life. It had maybe never been more important that the Avengers stand united... and yet, they had never been more divided.

"They're here," Bruce said quietly from his shoulder, flanking the soldier with Clint as if they were his own personal bodyguards. The brunette nodded forward, across the long, flat valley to the sun that glinted off metal.

Steve couldn't focus on the enemy ship. He could see only red and gold in his peripheral vision, color burning too brightly in a cold world.

_Tony._

Tony was close enough to touch. Tony was a thousand miles away.

He'd lost him. Maybe forever.

Steve froze.

Conscious thought stuttered to a halt, as if the gears in his head had simply lost power suddenly and ceased to continue to function. Like hitting a brick wall, he could no longer convince his feet that they had a reason to take another step; that his lungs had a logical purpose to continue to draw breath.

Sense and reason had abandoned him entirely. In a world where Tony was no longer the compass that guided him, the anchor that kept him grounded... he had forgotten what he was meant to be. How he was meant to continue in a strange and terrifying and unfamiliar new world. Who he was.

What truly terrified him was that it had been so long... so long since he'd doubted he'd come out alive, to strong arms and a warm chest and those smiling eyes. For so long, Tony had been there, in one capacity or another, to pull him back into his strength and allow him to forget the wounds of battle, the wounds of being a stranger in a foreign world. The wounds of simply being alive when he should have died long, long ago.

There had always been Tony.

And now he didn't have any of that. And for a moment, it felt like he didn't have anything.

Breathing became a complex task, beyond his understanding. His chest seized up; lungs burned.

"Steve," Clint's hand was there, was hot on his arm, burning, brand-like, strong.

Steve took a breath because he suddenly remembered how, and turned, wide-eyed and broken, to meet his gaze.

"Listen," the archer addressed him directly, eyes deadly-serious, brows creased. "I know you. You're a _soldier_. You got that? You're a soldier."

That's all he needed to say, really. It was all that Steve had somehow forgotten to remember. It was as if the words, the memory, the very idea, gave him permission to access that hidden part of himself, that old strength that seemed to have been buried under several days worth of anger and hurt and pain.

He was no longer Steve Rogers, the skinny, insecure kid from Brooklyn who would maybe always see himself that way. He was Captain America, a soldier created for this task. He was power and strength and capability and reassurance, and all the things he needed to be to protect the people around him.

He was a soldier.

And just like the injury that had disconnected him from his strength, and just like Bruce's remedy that had disconnected him from the pain... he removed himself that weakness and disconnected that doubt.

And it was maybe the harshest blow of all... but he disconnected himself from Tony.

He was Captain America again. And it no longer seemed to be a question of whether or not he could protect his country from this threat... it was only a matter of how he would do it.

Clarity slammed back down into his world like a hammer, the haze shattering around him like a glass cage that had only required acknowledgment to break.

He stood on a rocky, pitted plain, spotted with patches of snow and massive boulders. The hills around them sloped upwards into windswept crags and twisted tufts of brush, as cold and devoid of breath as the overcast sky above. No warmth was welcome here; no color or life.

At the far end of the valley, a long, thin alien ship sat amongst the rocks.

Breathing in deep, cleansing breaths to burning lungs as if he had never breathed air so sweet before, Steve moved. He stepped forward and began the walk across the windy plain. The Avengers fell into step behind him, and followed.

The Kree remained stationed stoically by their ship, waiting for their opponents to approach. They made no move to meet them halfway, establishing a sense of superiority that was not lost on the solider.

In the mind of the Kree, they had already won.

The team of humans approached the ship and stopped when Steve did. He could hear the murmur of alien voices, see the sharp white glints of shifting eyes. They were close enough for contact. It was time for the Kree to step forward.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, they did.

Jar-Sing was a tall, thin creature of humanoid proportions. Beneath nearly translucent blue skin, his features were visibly aged, but his long limbs were still thick and strong, corded with muscle. He held about him the air of a man—if such he could be called—who had once been respected as a warrior, but who had long ago transitioned into a leader.

The Kree that had surrounded the ship, pushing and pulsing with the scent of battle in the air, gave way before him as he moved.

Their deference to to their aging leader was not lost on Steve, nor the way several of the aliens' faces contorted from respect to disgust as he passed and his gaze moved safely past them. Whatever else these creatures were, they were first and foremost warmongers—and it was immediately apparent that even this bare modicum of diplomacy was not winning the Kree leader the popularity vote with his troops.

The Kree were thirsty for human blood... and Steve understood now that Jar-Sing was the only thing standing between them.

Jar-Sing, with a small contingent of his own warriors, approached slowly, his stride long and his steps measured. He carried a tall, decorative staff crowned with a hefty blade, but it appeared to be more of a ceremonial item than one meant for combat. Even so, Steve couldn't help an assessing glance up at that long, sharp edge, easily the length of his own arm.

"Avengers," Jar-Sing bowed his head to them in a way that may have been intended to show respect, but echoed of mockery. His voice was deep and smooth, but his English less than perfect. "We, the emissaries of the Kree, greet you."

"Skip the civilities," Steve found a strength in his voice that his body did not feel, his shoulders rigid with the tension of battle. "Explain your presence here. Maybe it's the small army you brought with you, but I get the feeling you're not just here to talk."

Jar-Sing's blue features took on a harder set, and Steve got the impression he was pleased to do away with the pretense of diplomacy. As Thor had explained, the Kree were a race of warriors, little accustomed or predisposed to the intricacies of civil conversation.

"Very well, Captain," the alien all but purred. "I did not expect such directness from your kind... but I welcome it."

"What do you want with earth?" Steve tried not to make it too obvious that he was counting the Kree forces; making note of their weaponry and gauging their intentions. On all fronts, the verdict was not comforting.

"A peaceful surrender."

Peace seemed to be the last thing on the Kree's mind, but Steve set his jaw hard and allowed Jar-Sing to continue.

"Your planet has the misfortune of occupying a place in the galaxy that suits our purposes quite well. As an outpost and economic center, such a location would be invaluable to our current struggles against the Skrull. You understand, of course, the need for such strategic posts, do you not?"

"Not," Steve snapped, feeling little remorse for allowing his pain and emotion to fuel his stoic demeanor. "You don't know much about the human race, I'm guessing. Allow me to educate you: we don't go down without a fight."

"Captain, you have the soul of a warrior." Jar-Sing spoke as if he were humoring a small child, hands outspread in manipulative supplication. "If you choose to lay down your arms and relinquish Earth to our control... we might find a place for your spirit amongst our own ranks."

Steve didn't have the energy for a proper rebuttal. "And if we refuse to surrender our home?"

Jar-Sing seemed less than disappointed, and less than surprised. "Then, according to intergalactic custom, we propose a conference of war. Our most powerful warrior," the tall alien beckoned with a long, spidery hand to the hulking warrior who stood several respectful feet behind him, "against yours. I present to you Krusae, champion of the Kree."

Steve surveyed the big alien, a muscle-bound warrior he had spotted earlier and marked as a threat. Though the gray-skinned beast stood a good head taller than his leader—and consequentially, several heads taller than any of the humans—he would be no physical match for the Hulk.

_That's something, at least._

"Captain," the thin face cracked into a thin, fearsome smile. "We demand your strongest. No less to face the great Krusae of the Kree wars. No less to face his hammer and appose the strength of his arm. To refuse is to surrender your planet. To admit defeat or death is to surrender your home. Such is the way of our people."

Steve swallowed, making a conscious effort to drop his shoulders and alleviate some of the coiled tension in his muscles. He turned questioningly to his left, to Bruce where he stood silent and contemplative at the soldier's side.

The doctor had already removed his jacket, already seemed to be completely involved in the task of neatly and systematically rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. His dark eyes flickered up to meet Steve's, and he nodded once, a gesture that seemed to convey encouragement for the soldier's performance as much as acquiescence to the task at hand.

"He's ready," the doctor said quietly, speaking of the green-skinned beast that lurked within him. A snake in the grass. A shark beneath the still waters.

Steve hadn't had any doubt, and yet... something within him hated the idea of throwing his friend to the wolves, alone and unguarded. To ask any one of the teammates he was tasked to protect to step out into danger by themselves... it went against his very nature.

Drawing in a deep breath, Steve nodded. He turned his attention back to Jar-Sing, who had been watching the quiet exchange between the humans like a hawk.

"We agree to your terms," Steve felt his heart grow heavy even as he said it, felt irrationally that his words were colored with betrayal. "Our warrior, known to your people as the Hulk... he will meet your champion."

"Do not insult us captain," the alien leader hissed. The horde behind him shifted and murmured in restless animosity, sensing the brewing tension.

Steve blinked, blindsided by the rejection. "We offer you our strongest, as you demanded. What more do you ask?"

Jar-Sing's oblong eyes narrowed to yellow slits, a long-fingered hand pointing directly out towards the soldier.

"We challenge Earth's most dangerous warrior. We challenge _you_. Captain America."

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Apologies for long wait. Real life = complete shit. Nuff said.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Been too long.

New AU-type story is up, I'd love to hear what you think of the first chapter. It's called **Flashover** and explores the idea of the Avengers characters (and a few extraneous comic characters) in a modern day setting as Firefighters/Rescue workers. There will be plenty of Steve angst involved, of course. Go check it out!

**.**

A few reviews to answer:

**WaffleNinja**: I hope to explore some of those issues more, but as this story is drawing to a close, it will be, more than likely, in the next fic. There are a lot of little facets between Steve, Tony, and Clint that I would love to develop more. I could probably write a dozen fics exploring all of those things and never run out of material, so... keep an eye out! Thanks for your feedback!

**Black-Dranzer-1119**: "Catatonia" might not be the perfect word for such a scenario, but it does indicate a sense of rigid immobility that is not quite sleep or senselessness but not quite waking, which is what I was imagining for Steve in that scene after his fever had broken, a limbo somewhere between unconsciousness and awareness. Sorry if my choice of words left you confused, I will try to avoid such ambiguity in the future. As for the other wonderful points you brought up about Tony's character: I do agree with you. Tony always struck me as the kind of man who didn't know how to deal with things in a healthy way. As you pointed out, he is self-destructive, masochistic, and vaguely suicidal. These are his reactions to his own (suppressed, ignored, incompatible, et. al) emotions, things he can neither control nor understand. His response is extremely unhealthy and irrational, but not altogether unexpected with what we know of human nature. It was my intention to explore this chaotic, dark side of Tony throughout this story (a side we see often in the movies): he can run all he wants from these problems, but he helped create them and sooner or later he's going to have to deal with them. I've done my best not to set him up as the "bad guy" here, perhaps without much success, but I really don't see him as the villain here. He is simply confused and unable to deal with his own emotions, a state of mind I and I hope many others are able to identify with. As for thinking that he would never lay a finger on Steve... I think we all feel that way about the person we love. And many of us are capable of hurting them, intentionally or unintentionally, despite what we actually feel. It's the sharpest edge of the darkest part of our nature, and not something we are often called to come face-to-face with. But it does exist, and we never know what we are capable of until a split moment of rage and confusion strips that choice away from us. This dynamic—bringing pain, physical and emotional, upon the person we care the most about—was one of the springboard themes upon which I developed this fic in the first place. It's a hard one to look at, but a necessary one, and it coincided with my persona life at the time to the point where writing those first few chapters became my truest form of therapeutic creativity. ….Ahem, anyway... Sorry for the length of this reply, but I really did enjoy the points you brought up in your review. I think they were all very valid, and it helped me see some of the weaker points of my fic so far, namely, not enough exposition into Tony's thoughts, a problem that already bothered me and I intended to remedy in this chapter. And you are right, it will be extremely difficult for the Avengers as a unit to survive the fallout of this entire debacle, a scenario which I have also considered exploring in a follow-up fic. There is a lot of broken trust there now, a lot of suspicion and resentment and confusion that needs to be handled. Again, thank you so much for your feedback, I truly do consider it one of the most thought-provoking bits of input I have received thus far. I hope that future chapters will restore some of that balance you mentioned, though I believe it goes without saying that even a "happy ending" at this point will be at best a bittersweet one, leaving us much to explore in further fics. I hope you continue reading!

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Thank you SO MUCH to my other reviewers; **spidersfrommars**, **Luna** **S**. **Renaldi**, **tvaddict88**, **KuroTsukiKun**, **GrimmXEchelon**, **o**, , **InsertNameHere**, **Guest**, **Fleur**, **TheBoyWhoLivedIsDead**, **xfailingxheartbeatx**, **Avengers lover**, **vampyfreak**, **FPNCK**, **TheDreamerLady**, **rowen** **raven**, **Guest**, **phat**, **DosentLike**, and **WickedBlue**, as well as all other readers (you know who you are).

Your feedback means the world to me, and if it's not obvious already... I take into consideration your every critique and suggestion. I hope to write what you want to read, so keep your suggestions/thoughts coming.

Much love.


	13. Edge

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**C13: Edge**

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Jar-Sing's words hit the Avengers like a nuclear bomb. The eruption of outrage was almost physical—and thankfully it was Bruce who stepped in to hold Clint back as the archer lunged, because Steve didn't think he could do that himself and still keep up the facade. He grimaced as the archer's shoulder slammed into his own, but managed to conceal his attempts to stay upright. For the first time in days, no-one's attention was focused on him.

This was made all the more obvious when raising a hand in mild supplication did little to quiet the furious team at his back. Thor's voice was almost a weapon in and of itself, booming across the valley as if he fully intended to harness its force to blast the Kree warrior off his feet. Weapons had appeared out of thin air; Clint had bypassed negotiation entirely and descended straight into violently cursing at the alien leader as he continued to struggle against Banner's restraining arms.

Jar-Sing was wearing a thin, spidery smile, stretched so wide it looked like it might crack his leathery skin at any moment. His eerily long fingers were steepled before him as he took in the chaos his words had ignited in the Avengers, all but basking in the light of his own destruction. He'd lit the match of contention and brought forth an emotional reaction from his opponents. He'd gained the high ground with this move, a check in a game of chess. The move wasn't lost on Steve. Nor was the fact that they had played right into his hands. Unfortunately, they no longer had a choice.

"Don't be an idiot," the mechanical voice snapped out through the Iron Man suit, finding a way to break through the chaos as Tony managed to be even less diplomatic than usual, which was saying a lot. "The Hulk is our most physically powerful warrior, hands down. He could even kick my ass, though you won't hear me say that twice."

Steve wondered if he was the only one who caught the undertone of desperation in the billionaire's voice, the raw and ugly fear. He wondered if he was the only one who couldn't figure out why it was there.

Jar-Sing was deeply enjoying the humans' struggles; that much was painfully obvious. He humored Iron Man with a condescending version of his earlier smile, all power and control and barely restrained glee. This was going exactly as he had planned. Maybe he hadn't even known what kind of a wrench this would throw in the works; maybe it was going even better than he'd imagined. Either way, it would be to his advantage in the end.

"You seem to misunderstand," Steve cut in because he knew that he needed to take control of the situation, to do something to head off the downhill plunge. "I am flattered by your comparison. But I am not the strongest among us. I do not have the strength, the vivacity, or the firepower of many of my colleagues. I am just a man. Human."

"Captain, you underestimate yourself," the alien purred, eyes narrow and glinting beneath heavy brows. "You are a leader. Your word is law to the most powerful creatures to inhabit your planet; your galaxy, even. You hold their lives in your hands. And you, Captain America... you are the man who inspires them. And that makes you the most dangerous Avenger of all."

Silence descended upon the valley, unbroken by the eerie whistle of the wind through the crags. This silence was heavy. Impenetrable. Absolute. Reeking of an ugly truth.

A cold, unyielding calm had settled into Steve's bones. This turn of events had shocked him the least, as if all indicators had been pointing to this moment and his mind had chosen to ignore them for the sake of appearances. That this had been the final outcome was strangely suiting. Given the week's run of bad luck... it only made sense that it would come down to this.

Pulling up his shoulders almost imperceptibly, Steve turned his head to examine the stricken faces of his team, knowing beyond all doubt that they could not be taking this turn of events well.

Tony was typically unreadable, a strength his suit gave him and one to which he always retreated. Behind that armored faceplate there was no telling how the brunette really felt. Natasha looked ready to start a war, while Thor stood with hammer in hand, glaring daggers across the space at their alien opponents. Bruce seemed resigned, but almost sick. Steve had the feeling that some small part of the doctor, too, had seen this coming from afar.

There was something unreadable in Clint's face, something stronger past the anger and indignation as the Kree leader's words rang in his ears. If it had been a sentiment that had any place there, Steve would almost have sworn that it was pride.

_You're a soldier,_ was what he had said. _Out of all of us you are the soldier,_ went unsaid, and in his delayed mindset it had taken Steve too long to recognize the subtext. Even as worried as the assassin was about Steve, he was proud of him too. Proud of him for who he was and what, and what others saw in him.

Steve swallowed an unexpected surge of emotion and turned away.

Bruce looked up from the ground he had been studying so intently and caught the soldier's eyes. There was a warning there, a deep and nameless fear. A promise. If Steve went through with this, the consequences would be severe. They might be fatal.

"You fear for your leader," Jar-Sing pointed out in assumed intrigue, cocking his head at the outraged team spread before him. "One must wonder what kind of leader this is, if his own followers have so little confidence in his prowess."

It was too obvious a bait, and Steve was grateful for the discretion of the others when they refused to rise to it. Clint was the only one who might have given up the ruse, a retort ready on his lips, but Natasha had the foresight to catch his arm and whisper something in Russian to him harshly. Trust her to keep her head when the men around her were flying to pieces.

Bruce stepped quickly to the soldier's side, turned his back on the Kree and kept their conversation away from the invaders' ears. And away from the rest of the team.

"Do _not_ do this," Banner commanded, and it was maybe as grave as the soldier had ever heard him sound. "Don't fight."

It wasn't a request.

"I don't see that we have a choice," Steve tipped his head down and responded unnecessarily, running through the motions to say what needed to be said. His tongue felt numb in his mouth, his jaw numb as it moved. The rest of him was numb, too.

"You could always choose not to commit suicide," Bruce suggested, his tone lighter than the deathly-grim expression that had taken root in his eyes, settled in the lines of his face like storm clouds.

"Will my body hold out?" Steve asked, hollow.

Bruce met his eyes squarely. "No."

The soldier nodded into the bruising wind, but it was nothing surprising. It was nothing that hadn't been coming since the very beginning of this mess; since bad luck and circumstance had coincided to turn their entire world into a trainwreck they could no longer look away from.

And selfishly in that moment, the soldier thought that perhaps it might all be better this way.

Jar-Sing seemed more than content to let the humans squirm, watching with sharp eyes and a malevolent smile as Steve struggled to hold up his walls, the pathetically flimsy veneer of strength and wholeness that was all he had right now. The alien leader was ready. Patient. Calculated. A cat watching a mouse.

The soldier wasn't sure why he turned to Tony. Maybe he felt eyes on him; maybe he only hoped they were there. Maybe the vestiges of his old self still desperately craved the man; his approval and support and affection. Either way, he found the Iron Man suit staring at him. Somewhere behind it was the man who owned Steve's soul.

Twenty-four hours ago, the moment would have given him strength.

Today it only broke what hope remained within him.

Everything in him wanted to fight for this. Wanted to turn to Tony and demand more than what he had given him; demand more than the evasion and excuses. Wanted to ask for a better lie. One that he could believe.

"What are your rules of engagement?" Is what the soldier asked instead, turning to face Jar-Sing with an icy resolve.

"Steve!" Clint hissed, unheeded.

Jar-Sing no longer even pretended to mask his enjoyment of the situation. He beckoned his warrior forward to stand beside him; his raised hands silenced the thrum of alien bloodlust mounting at his back like a tidal wave waiting to break.

"Our champion will meet yours in combat," Jar-Sing droned out, his voice an eerie howl on the empty plane. "One warrior against one, with no outside interference permitted. You may use the weapon of your choice."

Steve's eyes flickered downwards, drinking in the ugly barb-headed blade at the end of the spear in the hand of the Kree champion. It looked heavy. It looked lethal.

"If you are killed or choose to surrender, you will forfeit the earth and all of it's citizens to us."

"And if I defeat your champion?" Steve wondered if that sounded as much like a too-distant dream as he thought it did.

"Then your planet is spared," the alien replied as if it were the most obvious answer in the world. "We will leave your precious earth to it's own devices and seek new grounds elsewhere."

The alien leader's gestures were still too open; his voice too warm. Jar-Sing was reading a script, playing the lead in an elaborate production of his own creation. The Avengers were only pawns, forced into roles that culminated in the inevitable. They could no more turn the page or change the lines as they could avert the rotation of the earth. They were outnumbered, overpowered, and now, outwitted.

The situation was dire. There was no other way to look at it. Steve had been singled out by the worst possible enemy on the worst possible day and there was no way they came out on top here... There was no way Steve did.

"Steve, we have no way of knowing—this could be some kind of trick," Clint appeared at his arm, a strange note of desperation tinging his voice as he spoke, low and fast. "We have no guarantee that even if you fight, even if you win... they'll keep their word."

"You're right," Steve replied hollowly, eyes distant. "We don't have a guarantee. We just have a chance."

"We have _no_ chance," Clint spat back, and this time he wasn't as good at hiding the fear in his eyes, "you heard Banner. You heard him. You won't be able to survive this—"

"I don't need to survive it," Steve turned his eyes to meet Clint's, his gaze cold even while his soul begged his friend's forgiveness for his words. "I just need to win."

Clint was shocked into silence long enough for Steve to step forward, all strength and confidence and crumbling lies.

"I accept your challenge, Jar-Sing of the Kree. I will fight on behalf of Earth."

The pretense of civility fell away almost instantly; the alien leader was clearly ecstatic that the humans had played into his hands so completely. He turned aside and spoke harshly to his warrior. There was an intentionally-insulting beat that passed before he looked up again to acknowledge the team in front of him.

"You have chosen wisely," he dipped his head in condescension, "and you bring honor to your kind through battle."

"Enough talk," Steve was pleased to find that he was still strong enough to feel anger, to feel righteous indignation and outrage at this threat to his home and his people. "The terms have been announced; the stakes are set. There is nothing more to be said."

Jar-Sing seemed perfectly content with progressing. "Of course, of course... We have dallied long enough here. Choose your weapons Captain."

"I already have." Steve's fingers tightened around the handle of his shield.

"Then let the battle commence."

For all the noise the alien hordes had been making moments ago, they could certainly attain an eerie silence when they had a mind to. As soon as their leader spoke; as soon as he stepped gracefully backwards to clear the field of battle for the contenders, a chill fell on all who gathered. Even more than quiet, it was a slow, absolute stillness—there was scarcely a movement from either side, scarcely a breath as the warriors looked on.

Krusae alone moved, stepping forward on powerful, muscle-corded legs with his javelin in hand. There was a cold intelligence about his eyes; a cruel cunning and a darkness that he seemed to share with his brethren.

If Steve had been entertaining any notion that this might be a peaceful race, one with whom they might bargain and parlay... he found it slipping away now. These were not friendly creatures, nor would they ever be. They craved only domination. They tasted only blood.

This was it, then, the soldier noted distantly, feeling suffocated by the silence and wind and heaviness of held breaths and angry eyes. It all came down to him.

Captain America—not Steve anymore, not merely a man—shifted without conscious thought into a fighting stance, his weight mostly on his back leg and his good foot forward, shield at the ready. Strong when he wasn't. Standing tall when he didn't feel it.

He didn't have to look over his shoulder to feel his team pulling back and away from him, allowing him to stand alone on the field of battle. So it had always been, and so it was maybe always meant to be. It didn't seem to matter who else there was, what friends came and went in his eyes, who he became attached to or fell in love with. It always seemed to come down to just Steve, a sentinel on a harsh plain.

Alone. Deathly certain of his own strength. Deathly close to watching it slip away.

There wasn't a warning. There was no circling or taunting or testing. Krusae exploded from the earth like a cannon, all power and precision and muscle memory. He struck not with his spear, but with his empty fist. It hit Steve's shield with the force of a mountain and the sound of thunder. The power of the blow knocked him back ten feet and down to one knee, staggered.

The soldier rolled out of the way, the whistle of air telling him he had avoided that deadly blade by millimeters.

Steve didn't have the luxury of time anymore. It was now or never.

He would never know where he found the strength. Maybe he didn't. Maybe it found him. Either way, it was the soldier inside him that took the next moment and shaped it, the warrior in his soul that fueled the movement and power behind his shield as he attacked.

The soldier spent several adrenaline-blurred moments trading blows with the creature looming over him, dodging those deadly fists by inches. He'd hoped his evasions would infuriate his opponent, but the creature showed no signs if they did. Instead he seemed almost patient, allowing Steve to scramble away from his blows. Testing him.

Steve grit his teeth and labored on, desperate to find a weak spot before his luck ran out. It wasn't happening. Instead, he seemed to be finding his own weak spots. The rocky ground beneath them was unstable and cumbersome, and he found his boots slipping on the rocks more than once. Krusae did not seem to be having the same problems: his leathery legs ended in thick, wide feet that splayed out over a larger distance and seemed to have no trouble gripping the uneven terrain.

Krusae's mountain-sized fist came down towards the soldier in a wide arc, hammer-like and quick as lightning. Steve lifted his shield to block the attack; the ground slipped beneath him. A spray of rocks exploded from beneath his boot and he stumbled. He didn't have time to save his footing. Even halfway to the ground he had the presence of mind to protect himself with his shield. The blow that struck it pinned him to the rocky earth and knocked the breath from his lungs. He rolled to his side just in time to avoid another hit, and scrambled for purchase on the shifting soil; lurched back to both feet. This would have been a small victory, except that he didn't have time to do much more than that.

A heartbeat later a giant foot—the same ones that were allowing the alien such easy navigation of a land that was proving deadly for Steve—connected full-force with the center of the solder's chest. He flew backwards and collided with the earth for the second time, sliding through the debris, his momentum only stopped when his lower back impacted a boulder large enough to halt his momentum. He felt his mouth open and the cry of surprise and pain that erupted out of his chest, but for the life of him he couldn't hear a sound. He couldn't hear anything, really, past a dull roar of the horde and a strange ringing between his ears.

Folding in on himself in an attempt to escape the crippling pain now radiating from his back, he clumsily pulled his shield in close to his body, trying to protect himself at the same time that he tried to remember how to breathe. His side was warm with fresh blood, his back a pulsing brand of agony.

He was distantly thankful that the big alien had chosen to knock him down rather than go for the killing blow, a tactic he could have chosen just as easily. Steve was getting the distinct impression that the warrior was just playing with his food, now, and it wasn't an idea that appealed to his pride but at the same time it might be all that was keeping him alive for the moment.

He fumbled awkwardly to stand; he wasn't allowed halfway to his feet. The alien lumbered towards him and kicked him over again, sending him rolling. He held on to his shield for dear life, knowing it was his only lifeline now. Sooner or later, Krusae was going to get tired of toying with him. Sooner or later, he would finish him off.

The soldier dragged himself to his hands and knees, more sluggish with every new attempt.

_Think, Steve,_ he begged himself, desperate to find what he was missing—the moment of enlightenment, the key that would unlock a last-minute victory. He'd found it so many times before. It had to be there now, probing at the edges of his consciousness, nudging him for attention, too obvious and too close.

He didn't have the strength to match the next blow, but he caught it on his shield and rolled backwards with the force, allowing the momentum to push him to his feet and skidding backwards through the loose gravel. So far, so good.

Krusae roared, the first traces of emotion appearing in the form of anger as his prey regained his feet. The massive creature hefted up his blade, and suddenly he seemed to be done playing around. He charged.

Steve lifted his shield, and braced for impact.

**.**

Tony stood, helpless and stoic and as still as a fucking marble statue and _watched_.

He had to stand there and watch as his boyfriend—no, ex-boyfriend, he firmly remind himself—was pummeled into the rocks over and over again by a creature several times his size. He had to observe the way the soldier swayed sometimes like he could barely hold himself upright. He had to watch the expressions of pain that crossed his face when Krusae got a lucky hit in. He had to _listen_ as the hordes of aliens screamed their approval whenever their champion gained the upper hand and jeered when Steve escaped him, usually by a hair's-breadth.

What he had to do most was _nothing at all_ and he'd never in his life been so completely certain that the stillness would kill him. He'd thought turning his back on Steve was hard. This—this damned _nothing_ with which they were all cursed—was a million times worse.

For as terrible as he'd looked a few hours ago, Steve wasn't doing quite as badly as they'd all feared he would. The soldier was rallying himself in waves; now a pillar of confidence as he matched his opponent blow for blow, now barely holding his own beneath ceaseless, bone-jarring blows. It was infuriating to watch.

Tony stood alone, a little apart from the others, who would probably prefer a few more miles were between them at the moment but who did not dare appear any more fragmented in front of the Kree than they already did.

So far, not a single one of his teammates had said a word to Tony since they'd arrived and disembarked from the transport plane. As far as he was concerned this was exactly as it should be, and he did nothing to invite conversation with them.

He hoped they were angry. He hoped they loathed him.

Even so, he couldn't help but monitor their reactions as the fight raged on, his analytical mind constantly churning as he tried to assess the situation, deduce the relative odds as the champions battled for the fate of the earth. Clint and Natasha appeared classically stoic, their poker faces hard at work as they watched the scene unfold with eagle eyes. Thor on the other hand could hardly be called a dispassionate spectator—he followed the fight with his eyes and his expression, his fists clenching and unclenching and his whole body tensing up as he reacted to every movement. He was an Asgardian to the core; a boxing fan enthralled by the ins and outs of a good match. The fact that this one had potential life and death consequences, both for the solider and the entire planet, hardly seemed to dampen his enthusiasm.

It was Banner, however, who held the majority of the billionaire's attention. The doctor stood with his arms crossed and his eyes fixed darkly on the combatants, and for all intents and purposes he appeared remarkably calm about the whole ordeal. But his eyebrows were pulled together and a defined line had appeared between them, and it was hard to spot but sometimes he would hold his breath when Steve got himself backed into a corner. Watching Bruce, who certainly knew a far sight more about the soldier's physical condition than he did, was almost as stressful for Tony as watching Steve.

The alien horde—and damn but they got louder by the minute—let out a particularly violent screech of triumph, and Tony's heart jumped into his throat, his eyes darting quickly back to the field of battle.

He let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding as he realized the soldier was still alive, upright even, if only barely. Apparently Krusae's last blow had been close enough to excite the crowd, but even fevered and drugged and half-dead the soldier was no pushover. The red-white-and-blue clad human had managed to put some ground between himself and his opponent, a feat that had been difficult for him from the moment the battle started. Tony fought to control himself, silently cheering as the soldier flung his shield towards the alien and connected, sending the gray-skinned beast to the ground. The soldier pressed his advantage, leaping forward to seize up his shield and land blow after blow to his enemy while his guard was down.

The gathered aliens were in a frenzy, leaping and screaming and shaking their weapons towards the battlefield. It seemed like only a matter of time before the mob erupted, spilling out and overtaking the humans like a flood held back too long. Tony wondered with some apprehension if Jar-Sing would even be enough to restrain them if this didn't go according to their plan.

Though with the way things were looking... it really couldn't go any other way.

Steve had gotten the hang of things for the moment, consistently using Krusae's explosive power to fuel his own evasions. They had moved the battle in a massive half-circle, starting in the relative middle and moving slowly clockwise in the direction of the alien ship. Their stalemate was starting to irritate everyone—mostly the crazed mob of onlooking aliens, but now Krusae as well. He still wasn't exactly reacting to his own continued misses dramatically enough to be helpful. The alien was remaining frighteningly in control, careful and precise and too powerful for comfort. But he growled in frustration occasionally, huffing and shaking his head like an angry warhorse or an enraged bull ready to charge.

It would only be a matter of time before he lost control, lost patience for the game of cat and mouse he played with the soldier. Whether that breaking point would spell destruction for Steve or allow a window of opportunity for the human to strike... well, that was anyone's guess.

The answer, as it turned out, was neither. Krusae never reached his breaking point, he never had to. He seemed to have changed tactics, and the next time Steve was in striking distance ha made his move.

The soldier landed a solid blow to the alien's side, and it wasn't apparent until it was too late that the creature had allowed the hit. Taking advantage of their proximity Krusae lashed out and caught Steve's shield, holding the human's weapon and right hand trapped in one of his own massive ones. Something in Tony's chest seized painfully, his entire body going rigid with fear.

Thank god the alien had lost his spear at some point—not that it made much difference. His empty fist was a catapult of power as he smashed it down onto the all-but-defenseless human, once, twice. He released Steve's arm like he was disgusted by him, let the soldier crumple to the earth like a rag doll.

It took everything in Tony's power not to vomit.

_Get up, Steve,_ he begged wordlessly, willing life into the bloody pile of flesh and tattered cloth. There passed a heart-stopping moment in which he was almost certain the soldier was dead.

But no, it wasn't over yet. Steve moved, jerking and twisting like a wounded animal running less on conscious effort and more on dying instinct as he fought to push away from the shadow looming above him.

It spoke volumes of the human's deteriorating condition that Krusae allowed him to move, simply watching and following the soldier's feeble attempts to escape.

Sensing that the end of the combat was drawing near, the once-wide circle that had been allowed for their free movement was slowly constricting. The aliens inched closer by the moment, and the Avengers started forward slowly to match them, drawing in their side of the ring.

Steve labored to his feet, swaying dangerously in the wild breeze like he would fall again at any moment. His eyes were glazed and his face nearly unrecognizable with matted blood. He looked like death warmed over. He looked like a walking corpse.

Krusae allowed the soldier to regain his bearings and tested him with a few lazy blows, allowing them to be pushed aside on the human's shield, driving Steve back with every hit until he fell, exhausted and spent back to the ground. In the end, maybe that was what saved him.

Tensions were thick on both sides. It was only inevitable that one of the threads would snap.

Thankfully, it was not from the side of the humans.

Tony's eyes darted past the battle-locked opponents, to the pulsing fringe of alien warriors that stood behind them. One had stepped forward past the others, an ugly-looking barbed spear raised. The horde surged forward in a moment of triumph, and the hunched alien was not able to contain his bloodlust. He saw an opening with the soldier's back presented to him, and lunged forward to strike.

Tony saw red. He wasn't even aware of moving, but in the space of a heartbeat he had rocketed across the small space and tackled the creature to the earth. His limbs were numb beneath the armor. He struck the alien scrabbling beneath his hands like he was striking stone. Like he was striking himself. And if he channeled all of his rage and frustration and guilt about Steve into this one moment, well... he really didn't think anyone could blame him for it.

By the time he came back to his senses he was breathing hard and fast, his pulse racing. What remained of the alien was now lying on the stone beneath him, a bloodied pulp of flesh and bone.

Somewhere behind him, all hell had broken loose.

"Cowards!" Clint was screaming, bow at the ready as he sighted in on first one and then another warrior. Thor and Natasha stood with him; Bruce had given up the pretense of peace and seemed only moments away from turning into the beast that hid behind his mild manners and brown eyes.

Jar-Sing had the foresight to hold back his warriors, and it was a good thing, too. The spindly alien's upturned hands were the only things keeping the screaming horde from tasting blood.

Krusae was perhaps the only one of the aliens who looked strangely untroubled. He crouched several yards away, his small eyes shifting, predatory, cunning. Wisely, he didn't move a muscle as the mayhem erupted around him, and his stillness bought Steve precious seconds to haul himself to his hands and knees, shaking and reeling and looking as if he was about to retch.

"Your warriors have breached the terms of combat," Thor was booming out, his hammer leveled out in threat towards the gathered aliens, "you do shame to your race through this outrage!"

Jar-Sing swept forward, snapping out words in a deep, guttural language and throwing warriors out of his path when they were too slow to part before him.

"We will allow a recess," growled the tall creature, clearly angered by the turn of events but unwilling to abandon diplomacy just yet. "My warriors will not interfere with the fight again."

"See that they don't," the Norse god warned, moments away from his breaking point. He had remained so calm so far, so contained for the sake of the chaos erupting in his teammates—but the repression was a volcano, building beneath the surface, gaining power and momentum as it waited for a chance to erupt.

Feeling lightheaded with rage, Tony stumbled gracelessly to his feet, backing away from the other aliens without turning his back on them. He turned only briefly to seek out the soldier, to confirm that he was still alive and well.

Alive might have been a generous term in this instance. "Well" certainly was.

Whatever resolve Tony had found over the past several hours completely dissolved at the sight of Steve, battered and bruised on a bloodstained field. He stationed himself protectively in front of the soldier to give him time to collect himself, his every sense attuned to the blonde even as he watched the gathered army with growing apprehension.

They were thirsty for blood. They were close enough to taste it.

"Steve," Tony found himself calling in poorly-hidden alarm, his pulse racing with fear. He dared to look over his shoulder, to feel his entire body clench with horror and fear at the state the soldier was in. "Steve?"

The blonde swayed and Tony forgot everything: the past few days, the broken life and lies between them, the army of aliens standing, bloodthirsty and armed at his back. He dove forward and caught the soldier as he crumpled.

Steve doubled over the iron arms that held him and began to vomit out mouthfuls of blood.

Tony held him tight until his arms ached, fear pulsing in his veins like a steam engine, making it hard to hear, hard to think. Harder still to breathe as crimson splattered out onto the granite, deep and colorful, mocking the colors of Steve's shield with their mimicry.

_Jesus Christ, I'm afraid..._ Was all that he could coherently process past the wet, harsh sounds of the man he loved most struggling to continue breathing, past the furious wind roaring around them, pulling them down, away from this horror and hatred.

The things he had told Steve only hours ago seemed ridiculous now, weightless and meaningless. As if their petty disputes made any difference when the soldier was in pieces in his arms; as if it mattered when his body was ripping itself to shreds for the planet and people he loved. What did it matter if Tony was sick with guilt and grief, when Steve might not even make it off this ugly, windswept battlefield?

It didn't matter. Nothing mattered but getting him out alive.

"Tony," Steve was moaning under his breath, eyes screwed shut and fingers white-knuckled on the suit. He didn't even seem to know that the man he was calling for was there, was holding onto him like he was made of glass, ready to shatter.

"I'm here," Tony assured him mindlessly, knowing nothing for sure but that he _could not _hear that note of desperation in the other man's voice again; would not be able to bear the strain of the sound. "I'm here, I've got you. I've got you, Steve. I'm here."

"Tony... It's you..." The word fell from Steve's torn lips beside a thin trickle of blood. Thick lashes fluttered against bruised skin.

The sound was killing him; Tony was certain of it. "Yeah, it's me. It's okay, Steve, I've got you. Look—I know, I know things are a mess right now. I know what I did, what I said—but no matter what happens... I believe in you. Do you hear me? I do. Please, just be okay... just be okay..."

He was babbling, shaking in his skin, he realized with alarm, and he could not remember the last time he had been so afraid. He couldn't remember the last time he had wanted to take someone's pain for them, even if it meant taking it on himself. He couldn't remember the last time he had loved anyone so much. Maybe he never had.

"Let's get you up," Tony choked out to drown his own thoughts, an unwelcome suckerpunch to a resolve he'd thought was ironclad only minutes ago.

Pulling Steve to his feet, forcing him to stand on broken bones and stones slick with puddles of his own blood was easily one of the hardest things Tony had ever done. His stomach churned. His heart ached. He tried to pull away.

"Tony, no—!" Steve latched onto him as the iron suit tried to pull back, plying the last of his failing strength to keep the brunette there in his grasp.

"Shh," Tony placated furtively, hesitating only a moment before making the decision. He triggered the control in his suit and the impenetrable faceplates that had been his surest defense slid away, leaving him mercilessly there, mercilessly _human_ and close enough to touch. Steve breathed out a sob, heavy with relief.

"You don't get to do this," Steve demanded, the words tumbling out in freefall, unhindered, unfiltered. His bloody fingers slipped on metal; broken bones screamed as he tightened their grip. "You don't get off... that easy. Don't, you don't..." His breath hitched; his vocal chords failed.

"This is not the time," Tony choked out as his own grip tightened in response, anger and incredulity overpowering the hurt those words ignited. "This is the furthest thing from the time for that, _you_ _idiot_—"

"No! This _is—_it'sthe only time." Steve threw back through blood-spattered lips, trying to match Tony, anger for anger, passion for passion. "This is—"

His knees gave out before he could even finish a complete thought. Tony stayed with him easily, supporting his weight as the soldier crumpled to the ground. Because Tony was maybe the only person who'd ever known... who could tell when Steve needed to stand, and when he needed a moment to fall.

"Stay," Steve choked out, stubborn to the end, coughing as blood slid from torn lips.

The soldier didn't need to clarify. He wasn't asking Tony to stay for the moment, for the here and now. He was asking him to stay for good. And it was all the billionaire wanted and all he knew he couldn't grant.

"Steve—_Steve_, I can't _hurt_ you anymore," Tony answered harshly, his voice dropping to keep the words between the two. The others had formed a protective barrier around them several yards away, choosing the moment's practicality over grudge as they allowed Stark to pull the soldier back together when they knew they no longer could.

"Then don't," Steve challenged, offering a thin smile as his body shuddered. It might have been meant to comfort and reassure; it only served to highlight how terribly the soldier looked.

"Jesus, Steve," Tony choked, unable to hold onto the frayed edges of his facade for a moment longer. He was breaking; broken, gone. Whatever facade of impassivity and coldness he'd meant to present to protect them both had completely dissolved. That they were having this conversation—here, now—was so unbelievably surreal that it might even be their salvation. Because this was them, this was their lives. When had they ever done things halfway? When had they ever taken the easy road?

"Please, please, please..." Tony's voice deteriorated into a broken whisper as he pulled the solder's forehead against his own, thoughts breaking down into a nonsensical stream through which his pain leaked helplessly, water through a sieve. The pretense was gone; control a thing of the past. He was broken and everything that had hidden that fact from the world was broken now, too. The words spilled out now that the dam was destroyed, and he could no more stop them than he could patch the pieces of Steve's body and spirit back together through sheer willpower.

"You _know_ me," he pleaded hoarsely, "I don't make promises, I don't keep them... I don't get attached like this. I can't; I hate it. I hate that it feels like I'm waking up and finally remembering you instead of knowing you for the first time... I hate that you fit me so perfectly. I hate that you have this kind of power over me—"

His voice broke and he cut himself off sharply, clenching his jaw so hard that it burned. He'd said too much. He'd dug too deep; been too honest. He couldn't continue. He couldn't stop.

Steve's eyes were glued to Tony's, confusion and wonder fighting for dominance in his eyes as he found himself blindsided by what he was hearing. Words Tony had never spoken to him before, thoughts he had never translated into reality. Emotions the soldier had heard reciprocated only in his brightest dreams. Tony knew this. He'd always known.

"Tony—" the blond tried, reaching up a bloody hand.

"Don't," the billionaire growled, intercepting Steve's shaking fingers and pinning them to his side. "I don't deserve your forgiveness."

"That's not... not what it's about," Steve smiled, the expression transparent and frightening. "If we both got what we deserved... I might never've met you... at all." The thought was clearly painful enough to him to steal his breath, and Tony allowed the soldier moment to compose himself.

"It's a really great thing, about life... sometimes we just get... to have something we don't deserve." Steve labored through the words and the pain as he turned his trapped hand awkwardly, holding on to the armored one that held him still. He didn't notice the blood he smeared onto the plates. He sounded so tried. "I had you, didn't I?"

Tony was finished. A sob escaped him, fought its way out of his throat without his consent. It was a sound that pierced through the strength in the soldier's eyes, through the veil of invulnerability and straight to the soul. Tony had never let Steve see him cry, never once even allowed that he could. The soldier blinked up at him through blurred vision, confused and bewildered and unsure if he was even seeing it now.

"Give me a chance, please," Steve begged again, desperate, exuding a strength he didn't feel. "Give me a chance."

"I'd give you a million, you crazy bastard," Tony laughed through traitorous tears, tightening his grip on the blonde's good shoulder as he wiped them roughly away. "You've given _me_ too many."

"Give me a chance," Steve repeated stubbornly, wincing, breath hitching as his body protested the fact that he was still breathing at all. "If I win this—give us another chance. Please."

Tony met Steve's eyes for the first time, and still didn't feel like he deserved to. He didn't deserve the worship in those baby blues; the way Steve was constantly forgiving his every sin. Even the unforgivable ones. _Especially those._

"I wish I was as strong as you," Tony breathed into the bloody, matted blonde hair, eyes slipping shut in prayer. "I wish I was strong enough to stay away from you."

Steve didn't need to be a genius to read the acquiescence in those words. His body sagged in relief, his exhausted, white-knuckled grip faltering. Tony snatched up his hand quickly, desperate to keep him going, keep him strong, because if the soldier stopped now he didn't know what would happen. But he suspected that he might fall apart completely, and no amount of pleading and pep-talks would be able to prompt him back into fighting shape.

Tony pressed his forehead hard against Steve's, crushed his lips to the soldier's dry, bloody ones. "You win this," the brunette commanded harshly, "you don't back down. You—you go out there and kick some alien ass... and you come back to me."

This time Steve's smile—big and real and brilliant, and perhaps the most beautiful thing Tony had ever seen—was the clouds making way for the sun. A storm of a hundred years finally dissolving to remind the world that clear skies existed. Even covered in blood and ash and dirt, the soldier was breathtaking.

"I will," he breathed, and Tony had no doubt that he meant it with every fiber of his being.

"Steve," Banner's voice broke the moment, and neither of them had even seen him approach. His eyes flickered briefly towards Tony, but the doctor chose not to acknowledge him. "They're getting restless. They want to start the fight again."

Toncy clenched his jaw and it burned, burned through his bones and his chest

"Okay," he ground out through his teeth, trying to come to terms with what was happening, his mind racing to outsmart the impossible scenario. "Okay—just—just stall them, for a minute."

"Tony—" Bruce warned, disapproval and doubt heavy in his tone as he addressed the billionaire directly for the first time.

"Please, Bruce." Tony was too tired, too threadbare and worn-down to do any more than beg. "Just a few more seconds. That's all."

The doctor heard it, and hesitated only a moment. He opened his mouth for a moment as if he was about to speak, but quickly shut it again. He turned away and left them alone for a heartbeat longer.

"Tell me what I can do," Tony was begging again and he knew it, couldn't even pretend to care. "Tell me, Steve. Anything."

The soldier didn't seem to be listening anymore, drawing in long, bracing breaths as if he was mentally talking his body into being strong enough for another round.

"Only you," Steve coughed, laughing incredulously through the pain up at crystal-blue skies, "Only you. From the moment I met you... you were the only one. You've always had the power to stop my heart."

"Been there, done the damage," Tony's words were thick with self-loathing, harsh like poison. He hoped Steve wouldn't say anything more. He didn't think he could bear it. He didn't think it could mean anything less than goodbye, if he said it now.

"You can start it again, too," Steve said. His voice had dropped almost past the point of hearing.

"I don't know how," Tony whispered, as if to himself. He stared down at the blond for a too-long beat, searching his eyes for an elusive answer. Memorizing the color just in case he never saw it again.

What more could be said? There was nothing left.

"Steve," Bruce was back, appearing at Tony's shoulder, looking apprehensive and regretful and practically gray with fear. "They're not going to give us much more time."

"Christ..." Tony swore, his voice breaking. He was shaking, he was disturbed to realize. Still pulsing with a fear he could no longer repress or divert.

Steve didn't have the energy to say more. He looked so very tired just then, and so very old—like the weight of the years had finally caught up to him. There had been so many times in the past when Tony had silently wished that the solider _would_ look a little more his age, if only so the brunette could feel a little more comfortable with what existed between them. This was the first time he'd ever caught himself wishing for just the opposite. He wanted to take those years back from Steve, make him look young and bright and pure again. Like the kid he was. Like the hero.

By now the soldier wasn't too proud to take Bruce's helping hand and lurch upwards. It took both of them to hold him upright as the landscape spun sickeningly around him and black spots danced in his vision.

"Bruce," Steve still sounded old and tired and half-gone, eyes closed. "It's time."

"_Steve_," Banner pulled the soldier close and spoke directly into his ear, holding him up as much as he could. His voice was heavy with warning. "I don't have any idea what it will do to you."

"What?" Tony cut in, alarmed at the sudden turn the conversation had taken. "What will do to who? What's he talking about?"

Steve ignored him, maybe because he needed to for his own resolve, or maybe because it wasn't a question he could answer with a clear conscious. "Bruce... I can't keep on like this." His voice shook, and he paused.

When he opened his eyes again, they were clear. They were calm. "It's now or never."

The doctor hesitated, and Tony watched him closely. Maybe it was the moment, or maybe it was the light. But there was _something_ there on his face, and he looked as old as Steve did and twice as haggard.

Something ugly twisted up in the billionaire's chest, fighting against the moment and all that was happening. He didn't need to know the details, didn't need to understand it completely. He knew.

"No!" Tony lunged for the doctor's hand, but he was a beat too late.

Bruce slid a large needle into Steve's arm and depressed the plunger. A deep green liquid disappeared from the syringe and vanished into the soldier's veins.

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So, here's a nice almost-double-long chapter to apologize to you guys for the wait.

Please see my **LiveJournal** for an extended explanation of my absence, if you happen to give a crap.

This story has NOT been discontinued, nor will it be while I have any say in the matter. Yes, you may experience some extremely unacceptable time gaps between chapters, but I would never give up on this story, or any of my faithful readers, on a permanent basis. I'm far too emotionally invested in it now. This was my hardest chapter to write so far, so now that it's been pumped out the next few should come much easier.

I'm also in the process of going back and (slightly) overhauling previous chapters. By the time many of you read this I may already be done, in fact. This includes cleaning up old author's notes and reviewer responses, so please don't be hurt if I remove an old reply to you from a previous installment. I'm simply trying to clean things up and streamline reading for future viewers.

Thank you for your understanding and patience. I sincerely hope the wait hasn't been too hard on you.

Much love!

#CoulsonLives

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Thank you SO much to **GrimmXEchelon**, **WaffleNinja**, **Clack-WWBM-Lover**, **GRock87**, **Eph**, **LupinandHarry**, **Tacpebs**, **Dreamingofsnow28**, **FPNCK**, **Samantha**, **Guest**, and **Henka**.

You all deserve medals for your patience. Really, you do.

Further thanks go out to the following reviewers:

**Plushiepaw**: As I mentioned up top, I can at least promise that this story will not be discontinued whilst I live (probably shouldn't tempt fate, eh?). This chapter is for you, thanks for your patience and feedback!

**rowen raven**: I hope this chapter answers some of your (quite accurate) observations. The Kree are realy just looking to stir up trouble, in case that isn't obvious already. Thank you for your review!

**kriticalkookie**: Thank you so very much! That's very kind of you. Glad you don't mind the wait, I really can't help it at this point.

**TemeBaka**: I'm so honored that you've stuck around for so long, and that this story has you on your toes! I guess I can consider myself successful, in that case. Thank you so much for your feedback—and a new word! Haha. I love it. And I love you back!

**Margaret**: Right you are, on all counts. I have to say your... unique use of verbage definitely had me laughing. Thanks so much for reviewing!

**Fangirl29**: Thank you so much~ I'm very flattered, and so glad that you're finding the different perspectives to be balanced enough so as not to be too confusing.

**lazysundayz**: ~melts under all the flattery~ I'm always blown away by your reviews: your attention to detail, your beautiful compliments, and your insights into subtlty and subtext I honestly thought most readers might overlook. I'm doubly glad that you haven't completely turned against Tony. I knew from the beginning that maybe my hardest task throughout this story would be to keep readers from mindlessly hating him, but despite all that I try to do to redeem him it seems like most reviewers do anyway. I appreciate your sticking with it and keeping the faith, and of course your reviews provide me with no end of inspiration and motivation. Thank you a million times over for your support, and feel free to spam my review section any day. You rock.

**TheGoodShipLuLo**: Haha! Calm down, all will be explained. I'm flattered I have you so into the story, though! Thank you a million for your review!

**TheDreamerLady**: Ah, if only it was that easy. But this is the Avengers we're talking about, right? Nothing is ever easy with these kids. Thanks for your feedback dear!

**K.T. Tag**: Oh yes, if I had a dollar for every hour of sleep that fanficiton has sucked out of my life... Well. I'd be very rich right now. Haha. Your review made me wriggle with happiness, and I may or may not have re-read it about a dozen times. Allegedly. I love all that you picked up on, particularly on the complex nature of every character's feelings and their respective struggles. It makes me feel that much better about the possibly too-complex little web I've woven here. I apologize for this horrendously late chapter, and I hope you'll continue to love it! Thank you!

**Aliko Kinav**: You spelled marvelous right! Two thumbs up for you. And yes, Tony can be an annoying little bugger, can't he? I think that's half of what makes him so lovable though. Anyway, thanks so much for your feedback!

**igotproblems**: I know I took ages to update, so I hope you didn't die while you were waiting! If by some miracle you're still alive and my procrastination didn't kill you... this chapter is for you!

**nightowlv**: Honestly, you've given me one of the greatest compliments a writer can receive: to know that you took this fic and chose it to try something out of the ordinary, or that it has defied your expectations or the stereotype into which it would usually fit... that's the best thing I can hear. I'm flattered that you found an exception in this story, and I apologize profusely for the wait. There will be _plenty_ of comfort to follow the hurt, that I can certainly promise. In the meantime, I hope this chapter and chapters to come live up to your expectations. Thank you so much!

**Fleur**: ~hugs~ Thank you very much! And I am glad someone else read that mini-novel/reply, I don't think the person I was responding to ever read it. Either way I meant every word, and thank you again I haven't actually seen Iron Man 3 yet—I've made plans to go see it twice, but both times life managed to smack me upside the head and say "NO." Once I even had the ticket in my hand, and a call came in on my pager (I'm on a fire department). FML. Still gonna try to see it this weekend, so don't spoil it for me! (But is it good? Please tell me it's good!)


	14. Countdown

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**C14: Countdown**

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Since the day he'd willingly submitted his body to the agonizing process of gamma ray bombardment and serum injection, Steve had not once doubted his body's ability. He knew now exactly what he was capable of, and it was so much _more_ than it had ever been, more than he had ever dreamed. He had never imagined possessing this kind of power: the strength and stamina and skill to take on the largest armies and mightiest warriors the universe could throw at him. Catapulted from a scrawny kid who could barely do a push-up to the pinnacle of human fitness, he had learned to trust his body in a way he had never been able to before. He could push himself farther, move faster, lift more, and stand up to the harshest elements imaginable. His body was his shield. It had never failed him.

Not until today. Not until sleepless nights, a horrible accident and a brutal struggle against an alien champion had all combined to test his every limit. Now he commanded his limbs to steady, yet they trembled. He commanded his mind to clear and still it remained trapped in a haze of color and light, uncooperative. He asked more of himself and came up with empty hands. He had nothing left to give.

The soldier had found his own limits, and it frightened him to realize how close they were. How very real and human.

He was sure that any rational man would have stopped pushing at about that point. That most men, having reached that moment of having absolutely nothing left to give, might have gracefully retreated and been the wiser for it.

Steve did not have that luxury. Lately it seemed he had no luxuries at all. He had touched his limit, and now he had no choice but to push past it and play a guessing game with his own survival.

Back on the transport—hours ago, lifetimes ago—he had told Bruce that it all came down to him. In that moment he had given Banner the responsibility to make the choice that Steve would soon be unable to, and whatever happened he had begged him to know that he would not blame him for it. The soldier had to finish the fight once it started. There was no other option. Steve had looked down at the concentrated serum, the huge vial of thick green liquid that the doctor had prepared for just such an eventuality, and agreed to let it kill him.

Bruce had looked so torn, so conflicted that the soldier had grasped his arm and made him swear he would go through with it.

The doctor looked miserable and sick with guilt, but he had made that promise.

He didn't disappoint.

The serum invaded the soldier's bloodstream like a virus and nothing Tony could curse or scream could change the fact that it was done. For better or for worse, the decision had been made.

All Steve could do was brace himself and ride out the pain.

Getting hit by a bolt of lightening might have been a gentler sensation. Something alien and strong was pushing it's way through his veins, up and through, cleansing, changing, _burning_ what was there and creating something new from the pieces. The serum shot he'd been given earlier had been a boost, helpful and almost gentle, just strong enough to kick-start his metabolism. This one was a hundred times stronger and even if it was meant to be helpful in the long run, in the moment it was nothing more than searing, blinding pain.

Breathing had been difficult a few moments ago. Now each lungful of air was an act of great self-control, an uphill struggle during which he fought tooth and nail simply to pull enough oxygen in to keep from blacking out. At the apex of each released breath there was a split second of panic, a moment in which his lungs were empty and he honestly wasn't sure if he'd be able to fill them again. There was a struggle, and with sweat rolling down his face, he took another breath.

Tony's armored hands on his arms, bruising in their grip, were hot as brands. He was glad for them. They were all that still reminded him of reality, the only thing that kept him certain that he was still alive. He could still hear the brunette's voice, sense it rumbling up through his chest from where the side of Steve's forehead was pressed against the armor.

It couldn't have lasted more than a few seconds, but when his lungs started working on their own again and the blood rushing through his ears quieted down, Steve felt as if he'd aged a decade.

From there, feeling anything at all became a memory.

That strange disconnection he'd possessed earlier was back a hundred times over. He might as well have been controlling a puppet for all that he understood what his body was doing. He found himself sitting up on instinct, clarity pulsing at the edges of his vision like a bass drum. He felt no pain as Tony and Bruce helped him to his feet, even if he was now certain he could have easily stood on his own.

Tony's face was a crumpled mask of horror, and it was only at that moment that Steve realized his lover knew what Bruce had given the soldier. Maybe he didn't understand exactly what it would do to him or how, but he understood, as all of them did, that it had been a last resort.

It had to count, and it would, because Steve had a new fire within him. A new reason to continue and the only thing that ensured he could not fail. He had Tony.

His priority now was to make it through this fight, to win. To guarantee that his entire team survived.

Past that, he could plan nothing, imagine nothing, see nothing. There was no future after the moment that he emerged victorious and won the safety of the planet and people he loved. He didn't want to think too hard about what that meant.

Bruce and Tony were arguing in earnest now, but it was nothing more than a faint buzzing that rang in his ears as the soldier turned his head and surveyed their situation. He took in the gathered horde, near-crazed with lust for blood... The alien leader watching them like a hawk, the scarcely-winded warrior crouched across the field.

In the harsh light of new clarity, Steve understood what he had not before. He saw what had been right before his eyes, disguised by his own pain and heartbreak. The others had missed it too, because they were too focused on him to observe the obvious. He hated that his own incompetence had been the cause of such an oversight, but all he could do now was face it and fix it.

Win or lose, the Kree had no intention of leaving the earth in peace.

"Barton. Romanoff," Steve called out to the two assassins, who looked as startled to hear his voice as the others. They recovered and stepped forward quickly, ever the soldiers. "Listen carefully. As soon as the battle begins again, the invaders' attention will be fixed on me. That will be your only window of opportunity. There's enough C-4 on the transport to blow open a mountain. By the time the fight ends, I need those explosives rigged to that enemy ship."

It was hard to say whether Clint looked more shocked by Steve's commands or by the fact that the soldier was suddenly coherent enough to be commanding anyone at all. To her credit, Natasha was taking it all in stride with surprising composure. Perhaps it wasn't so surprising, really.

"Steve?" Bruce looked worried, questing eyes searching the soldier's expression as if he was afraid the blond had finally lost the last vestiges of his sanity under the pressure. Steve couldn't blame him; if he'd been an outsider, he probably would have been worried about that too.

But for now time was running short on them and he seemed to be the only one who understood that, so the soldier didn't spare the time to be gentle. An urgency had gripped him that was borne from more than the current circumstances... somewhere within him, his body's clock had begun to tick, a fatal countdown to the moment when even Banner and his science, even Tony and all the faith in the world would cease to hold him together. His instincts warned him that this moment was looming closer than ever, and it was imperative that he take full advantage of the time he had left.

"They have no intention of leaving," the soldier announced simply, his jaw set and his eyes cold with finality, "they never did."

Tony straightened up a little, and Clint's shock dissipated. Steve had only needed to scratch at the exterior of their own observations. The truth was close to the surface, waiting for them to see it. It hadn't taken much to steal way the blindfold distraction and anxiety had placed there.

"Why would they leave if they lose a single combat?" Steve pressed his point, eyes moving intently from one to another of his gathered team, "they have more than enough warriors to overpower us here, in the middle of nowhere, where they have us all in one place and off guard. And if they win, they've defeated us. The earth's last line of defense. Who else would dare to stand up to them?"

Silence reigned supreme for a long heartbeat as the team processed his words, weighed them for truth and then for options.

"The Captain is likely correct," Thor was the first to speak up in reluctant support of the prospect, his face grim with anticipation. "This was likely never a diplomatic counsel. The Kree have arrived with a war party. I fear that a simple defeat in open combat would not be enough to turn them away from their purpose. The true intent of this charade was to demoralize us by removing our leader." His eyes flickered apologetically towards Steve.

"We can rig that ship," Natasha spoke up in a voice that was quiet and unfailingly arresting at the same time, "but that's not our biggest problem here." She turned and fixed green eyes directly on the soldier, "what do _you_ plan to do?"

The question meant more than the words. She wasn't asking if he would continue to fight; not a one of them doubted that he would. She was asking him how he planned to win.

"I'm going to call them on their own tricks," Steve said simply, forcing his features into a smile he didn't feel, "and buy you the time to do what you need to do."

Bruce had given up protesting, given up trying to stop the downhill slide, and this fact didn't escape the soldier's notice. He couldn't do anything about it, however, besides pray for silent forgiveness and hope that when the whole mess hit the fan Bruce would be able to forgive himself someday.

"What the hell are you doing?" Tony demanded, that old spark back in his eyes the same way it was back in Steve's chest, "what the hell are you _thinking_?"

In his state of detachment the only reason Steve noticed the vice-like grip Tony had taken on his arm was because it kept him from moving forward, kept him grounded. He looked down at the red and gold-armored hand like it was something he'd seen once in a dream, unrecognizable and still hauntingly familiar.

"Steve?" The voice was gentle this time, bringing the soldier's eyes up to meet bottomless brown ones, so full of love and fear and concern.

"I'm okay," Steve answered the unspoken question with the expected lie, and felt no guilt because he felt nothing. His lips moved but he didn't feel them; his side was bleeding in strange little rivers down beneath his shirt, wet and warm, but it didn't hurt. _Okay_ seemed like a pretty simple way to describe it. Okay was the greatest lie he could tell.

"It was important to me," the soldier found himself saying, blankly looking down at the hand that held his arm instead of at the eyes that frowned at him in confusion. "It was—that you never asked about things. That you accepted me. Let me stay. And you always knew what I needed, and there was so much... And the parking spot. You gave me my own parking spot. You didn't have to do that. I've never had one, I mean—I should have said thank you."

He was rambling; he was foolish; he was clumsy and senseless, thoughts tumbling out in disjointed phrases and nonsensical shards of pure need. What he wanted most to say would not come out, even now when he had nothing left to lose and nothing left to give. He couldn't feel anything, couldn't feel this, wouldn't be able to feel the pain that would follow his unrequited confession. What harm could it possibly do to unzip his bleeding heart and show a little bit of the damage inside to the world? He could not possibly make things worse, so if there had ever been a time to grab Tony and kiss his boyfriend in front of everyone and tell him _I love you goddammit_ it was right _now_.

But that wasn't what came out.

"Thank you, Tony," he said softly instead and meant _I love you more than anything_, and looked up to meet his lover's eyes for a moment. Only one. He couldn't afford more, couldn't afford to get lost even when he wanted nothing more.

Wide brown eyes heard the words, loud and clear.

Too soon, Steve forced himself to turn away, to shut down his heart to match his body, to disentangle himself from Tony's iron grip. He stepped numbly away, back out onto a field slick with his own blood.

The battle wasn't won yet.

The alien warriors quieted as the soldier returned to the battlefield, their din subsiding to a dull roar. It was almost peaceful compared to the deafening cacophony it had been before. They anticipated blood, and this was all that moved them to fix their attention on the battered American warrior.

_Good,_ Steve surveyed his enemy, _let's see how long I can keep your attention now._

"Captain," the words slithered out of Jar-Sing's mouth like reptiles, his anger poorly-hidden, "I trust you are fit to resume battle? Unless of course, you intend to surrender?"

A murmur of approval made it's way through the alien mob. They shifted in hope and suppressed animosity. It was clear they would like nothing more than to be unleashed upon the earth in all their thirst and greed.

"I have no intention of surrendering," Steve found that his voice carried more power now, reached farther. Even this new strength was odd to him; he felt it no more than he felt the weakness that had crippled him before. It was only a tool at his command.

"As you wish," Jar-Sing seemed pleased with that declaration. "Then shall we begin? Krusae has been patient for long enough."

"Not so fast," the soldier stopped him, flexing his nerveless fingers around the handle of his shield, "I've had some time to think things over, and I have a few amendments to make to this whole song and dance routine of yours."

Even from across the field Steve could practically hear the hiss of anger as Jar-Sing's eyes narrowed. The horde really did go quiet now, hanging on every word that passed between their leader and Captain America. The only sound came from the wind, and the restless shifting of bodies and armor.

"State your request," Jar-Sing ground out at last, every word the sound of fraying patience, "but do not press our courtesy, Captain. The combat has already begun. There is little you could say now to alter what must be finished."

"You're right about that," Steve nodded once, and his voice was even stronger now, "this fight needs to be finished."

He waited for his words to sink in, waited just a beat too long to test the edges of what these alien invaders were willing to permit. He couldn't understand their insistence to stand on diplomacy when it was so obvious that they had no intention of honoring it in the end, but for now, he could use it to his advantage. And from where he stood, it was really his only advantage.

"You demanded the earth's most dangerous warrior, and you chose me. If a leader is the most dangerous element of any force, then the playing field must be even. I demand that you, Jar-Sing, meet me in combat."

Steve had, admittedly, expected the same reaction from the Kree forces that he had witnessed in his own team earlier: outrage, indignation, fury. Cries of protest at the unfairness and manipulation of the situation.

He hadn't expected them to leap, screaming and cheering to their feet in near-violent support of the idea.

Jar-Sing's blue skin darkened a shade as he stood, still as a statue and tall in the whistling wind. The soldier could almost feel the fury rolling off of him from across the field in palpable waves. The screeches and roars of his own army, thirsty for the sight of any blood, even their leader's, buffeted at him from behind and the wind from before, leaving the powerful creature suddenly alone on a bloody field.

This had been a gamble, Steve knew, attempting to turn back such underhanded tactics on the creatures who had initiated them. If the Kree refused the new terms, there was nothing any of the Avengers could do about it. The fight between Steve and Krusae would have to continue, and in his current state the soldier was certain now that he stood very little chance of coming out of that contest alive. If he faced Krusae again, his only goal would be to stay alive long enough to allow the assassins to do their job.

If, however, Jar-Sing agreed to fight—older, slower, not as strong as his younger champion—Steve had calculated that his own chances of victory would rise by a wide margin. In that case he would aim to defeat the Kree leader fairly and quickly. He could offer Jar-Sing a chance to accept defeat gracefully, take his army, and return to his homeworld. It would be the honorable thing to do on both sides, the path of least resistance and the path of least bloodshed.

It was almost too much to hope for.

The gears were turning in the alien's mind; that much was obvious even with the distance that separated them. Jar-Sing was caught now between his own terms of combat and an invading army that clearly bore him no great love. It was an unenviable position, but Steve did not withdraw his demand. He waited, and met those angry yellow eyes unflinchingly.

When the alien leader's decision was made, a long, thin hand snapped up to quiet the screaming army at his back, and for all their obvious malice towards him it worked instantaneously. That eerie silence fell again, and Jar-Sing spoke.

"Captain, you speak with a wisdom that does justice to your rank. I cannot refuse your challenge."

This time, no sign from Jar-Sing was enough to quiet the screams of his army. They erupted into chaos, and it seemed like nothing short of a miracle that they did not simply rush the field in their fervor.

_Tick tock_, Steve's body warned him, marching slowly closer to a perilous edge. Time was running out.

Jar-Sing appeared to be true to his word. He took his time about it but he shrugged the long, ceremonial cloak from his thin shoulders and passed it away to a waiting soldier, revealing the more traditional armor beneath. Two more of his warriors quickly appeared with his weapons, and he strapped a tall, narrow shield to his left arm before taking up a hook-ended blade in his right. It was shorter than the spear Krusae had favored, but it still stood nearly as tall as the soldier.

Steve didn't waste time on further pleasantries, but as he walked slowly forward he found that he was no longer strong enough to resist a brief look back.

Minus Clint and Natasha, both of whom had wisely traded places with the pilots from the transport to make their absence less obvious, the team stood where he had left them. Thor as grim as death, Bruce looking little better.

Only Tony met his eyes directly, and without his helmet the billionaire's pale features beamed with undisguised pride.

The serum must not have been completely effective, Steve realized, because the soldier felt _something_ at that expression. It was deep within in his chest in the deepest part of his heart, and faint, but there was definitely a spark.

For a long, irrational moment, Steve wished he could believe that everything would turn out alright in the end. He wished that he didn't know what kind of precipice he was sliding towards; wished he could imagine a light at the end of this tunnel. He imagined a reality in which he fought this battle and returned to Tony's arms, and the billionaire forgave himself for what he'd done and Steve forgave himself for handing his heart over to a man who would never give it back.

He had promised Tony he would win, and he'd promised he'd come back. But he hadn't been able to promise he would stay. He knew now that he wouldn't have been able to make that promise. He knew exactly what was waiting for him at the end of all of this, and it was just Tony's arms and Steve's closing eyes, and then darkness.

The soldier was just glad that Tony hadn't understood any of that, hadn't seen it in his eyes or heard it in his desperation. It was easier this way.

Maybe someday Tony would forgive himself. Maybe he would be whole again.

At least one of them could be.

Like Krusae, Jar-Sing gave nothing away when he finally made his first move. No pleasantries or side-stepping. Just a brutal, direct attack that the soldier was quickly coming to associate with the Kree race. He was far better prepared for the onslaught this time, his body not mired down in agony and his mind free of the worst of the haze.

Most blessedly of all, he felt nothing.

Steve did not feel the earth-shaking force that crashed down onto his shield, or the sting of rocks as he rolled backwards out of the way. He only knew that his body withstood it, and that he was able to retaliate with all of his former strength. He didn't stop to question the _how_ of it, the semantics of what was happening to his body or how long it could possibly last. He pressed his advantage and attacked.

The tall, thin alien was deceptively strong for his build, and quick as a tiger. But after fighting Krusae in a state far less stable than the one in which he now found himself, Steve found himself ready for it. This opponent was still smaller, weaker, slower by a fraction of a second every time. It made the difference.

Jar-Sing fought like a dancer, executing constant patterns of fluid movement and graceful evasions as if he did not distinguish one action from the next but instead played them out in sequence, one step bleeding smoothly into another. But he had been a leader too long and the part of him that had been a great warrior was rusty and dim with disuse.

Steve had the advantage of training on his side, the advantage of having been a soldier in an unconventional war. His was the element of surprise, of pressing an attack one step further when Jar-Sing thought he must surely be ready to retreat. Best of all, he had the advantage of feeling no pain when that blade skittered across his ribs, tearing fabric and flesh with it. He felt no pain when his shield was blocked and a crushing blow was dealt to the side of his face, drawing a new torrent of blood from already-mangled lips. When Jar-Sing pinned him to the earth and shattered his left shoulder, he felt nothing at all.

Even when the Kree warrior turned to dirty tactics and landed two well-aimed consecutive hits to the ugly, oozing wound on Steve's abdomen, a sign of weakness that had been all-too-apparent from the beginning... the serum held. His body did not register the pain it was surely experiencing, and science overrode biology to allow the soldier to remain standing. To remain fighting.

The soldier's apparent invulnerability was finally starting to wear on the alien leader, showing now in moments of hesitation and harsh breath, in glimpses of rage and trepidation in those eerie yellow eyes. Jar-Sing bled heavily from a gash on his back, opened moments before by the soldier's shield, and it was real and it was a weakness. It was all the soldier needed.

It didn't take him long to realize that for the first time in this whole fiasco, he might finally have the upper hand.

_Tick, tock._

Neither party was willing to back down, not while so much hung in the balance. Jar-Sing had clearly expected less fight from a battered human already drained to his last reserves and pummeled half-senseless by his strongest warrior, and his doubt continued to open windows of opportunity for Steve to attack. A lowered guard here, and Steve landed a powerful hammer-fist to the thinly armored torso. An overreach there and Steve held the alien arm pinned, delivering a crushing hit to the head.

Everything had narrowed down to this, down to now.

When Jar-Sing made his fatal misstep, Steve seized the opportunity like it was the last one he would ever have. For all he knew, it might be.

There was no more margin for error, or for doubt or despair. He knew now with one hundred percent certainty that he was stronger than this new menace, stronger by far than these strange beasts so intent on destruction. Because these invaders were fighting for power and greed and selfishness. He was fighting for his home. For his family. For everything that he loved.

And as true as that was and as right as it sounded, that wasn't even all that drove him now. It wasn't the strongest pulse of his weakened heart. That title had been stolen long ago by a man in an iron suit. It wasn't just _freedom_ or _America_ or _justice_ anymore. It was Tony.

How his love for one man had come to outweigh his commitment to an entire world, Steve might never understand.

Jar-Sing's arm descended, again and again in a series of punishing strikes that would, if Steve had not already lost all feeling, quickly numbed the limb that supported his shield. The soldier shifted; he broke the pattern into which they had fallen and refused to give an inch more ground to his adversary, bravely bracing himself beneath each new blow. When Jar-Sing fell back, it was only half-a-step. It was enough.

Steve did not allow the alien to regroup and try a new tactic; did not allow him the time to recover. He threw all his weight into pushing back against him, dealing a stunning blow to his enemy's torso. He surged forward, plying every last once of his strength into the rush.

The balance broke. The two warriors toppled to the ground, and Captain America had the upper hand, one knee pinning Jar-Sing's sword arm to the earth. The alien weapon lay a foot away from outstretched blue fingers, out of reach.

The air around them stilled, and they breathed into it, harsh and hollow.

"You are defeated. Yield," Steve rasped out, pressing the sharp edge of his shield hard against Jar-Sing's pulsing throat, "_yield_!"

"I will not. You'll have to kill me, Captain," Jar-Sing smiled up at the human, all bloody teeth and rasping breath, "you must end me here, in front of my army, and face their anger. It is the only way to die with honor."

Steve pulled back in disgust, rising off the prone creature and stepping away. He was having trouble focusing, forming words or response. He was silent instead, fighting the ebbing tides of his own mind.

It felt like years that he had been fighting without rest or comfort, but it was unlikely many minutes had passed. He hoped to god that Clint and Natasha had been given enough time.

"This is not the end," Jar-Sing pushed himself partially up, his blue-skinned chest heaving unevenly. "Intergalactic custom dictates we allow you a fair chance to defend your planet, but there are ways around such outdated rules," he spat at the soldier's back, uncowed by his own defeat, "we will wipe the planet of earthlings and leave none alive to tell the tale of this day."

It all made a little more sense to the soldier now, in a twisted sort of way. Even if it seemed sick that there were universally accepted customs on an intergalactic level for invading and conquering weaker realms, a race already at war would not welcome further attention from stronger, more morally conscientious realms. They would do what they could to avoid their wrath, even if it meant staging an elaborate war council on a small planet like Earth.

_Is there an intergalactic U.N.?_ Steve wondered distantly, thinking that he should probably ask Thor about it later because it might be useful information for S.H.I.E.L.D. to have in a crisis.

Except that for him, there probably wouldn't be a later. He almost regretted that.

The alien levered himself to his feet, unsteady and unarmed. Steve turned and allowed it, watching in apathy.

"We admire your prowess in battle, Captain," the alien growled low in his throat, "you have overcome your human limitations and held yourself as a true warrior. You share the spirit of the Kree. Long will we speak your name in veneration, but we cannot allow you to stand in the way of our victory."

"This is your last chance," Steve ignored him and insisted, hyper-aware of the strange tingling sensation beginning in the very tips of his fingers. It was the surest sign that this was almost over, that the serum had nearly run it's course through his veins. "Take your army and go. Leave the Earth while you still can. You can make it out of this alive."

Time ran short. The hourglass was almost empty.

Jar-Sing laughed, a high, nearly-hysterical sound that the soldier associated with loss of control on all fronts. Green blood was dripping down the alien's chin. "Your threats are empty, Captain! You are outnumbered. Lay down your arms, and I promise—your deaths will be quick." That old coldness returned to the alien's eyes, and the smile fell away, "and this, earthling... is _your_ last chance."

Steve looked down for a moment, a half-smile forming at the edges of his torn lips as he thought back on how predictable this all was; how expected and overdone. How many times had he heard such words from the mouths of tyrants? How many despots and rulers and been just as driven by their own lust for power? Time didn't matter. People didn't change.

The soldier felt inexplicably lighter when he lifted his eyes again. He could tell that his confidence unsettled Jar-Sing.

"Well. You can't say we didn't warn you."

And that was it. He didn't need to signal the assassins who were doubtless watching him. They had done their job and they had taken their cue . And now, they did not hesitate.

Somehow, Steve kept his feet as the world imploded around him. The last time he had heard anything so loud, been so blinded by flashes of light and pillars of fire spiraling into the air, he had been deep behind enemy lines in Nazi Germany, rigging a munitions plant to blow higher than the Empire State building.

This was bigger. This was louder, and brighter and a thousand times more welcome a sight. It was the symbol of a fight ended, a victory attained. It was the sign he had been waiting for that told him he had done enough, fought hard enough, and could finally let go.

Jar-Sing, still alive, was screeching in rage, his face a twisted mask of fury as he watched his ship careen up into the sky in pieces, watched the greater part of his invasion force be destroyed in a series of teeth-rattling explosions that were still shaking the ground. Any of his warriors that had been far enough away to escape the initial blast were in a similar state of panic and outrage, running, fighting, screaming, adding to the cacophony.

Steve stood as if rooted to the earth and looked on, a distant spectator.

The Avengers were suddenly there with him. They were around him, defending him, their energy finally unleashed upon an enemy they had been longing to fight for hours. For reasons he could not fathom the soldier simply stood numbly in their midst as the battle raged around him, short-lived as it was. He could do nothing else.

Thor decimated what few warriors had escaped the initial blast while Clint fired ceaselessly at those who tried to run. The Hulk had made his appearance and cleared wide paths through the remnants with massive, sweeping fists. The earth shook with his rage. Thunder and lightening crashed across a quickly-darkened sky. Smaller explosions were sounding in the distance as the wreckage of the alien ship stood in flames.

The roar of the massive green beast came beating in through Steve's awareness like a far-away drum, hollow and meaningless. He couldn't associate it with anything or anyone.

A red and gold blur blocked his field of vision for a moment, facing down a spidery blue creature Steve could no longer recognize. The struggle between the two colored shadows was brief. The blue form fell, his neck-snapped, to the cold earth.

Names were gone. Colors slipped away next. Even his own colors; even his own name.

Who was he? Why was he standing, silent and unmoving, while chaos raged on around him?

He couldn't remember.

_Tick, tock. _The clock stopped.

So did Steve's heart.

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Well, we've reached the denouement of the production. Was that update fast enough for you?

You can expect anywhere between two and four new chapters to come before this story is complete, and then hopefully not too long after, a sequel will be coming to a fanfiction site near you.

I have a **LiveJournal** and a **Tumblr**. Links are on my profile. Go get em.

I also forgot to mention it in the last chapter, where I should have mentioned it... but the line where Jar-Sing states that Captain America is the most dangerous Avenger of all because he inspires them is taken directly from the comics.

Just in case you were wondering. I didn't make it up, it just inspired me.

Thank you to the following reviewers for stopping in and leaving such lovely words of encouragement: **GrimmXEchelon**, **Tacpebs**, **Juliakaze**, **fangirl29**, **Aliko** **Kinav**, **GRock87**, **igotproblems**, **Guest**, **Rebal**, **Harlie** **Rayne**, and **e. g. finch**.

I would just like to point out to the world in general that I have more awesome reviewers than they do. I'm not saying they're fanatical, just that they have great taste, they're very smart, and they're better than other people.

Thank you also to:

**Margaret**: Well your enthusiasm was certainly contagious. :) And Tony is far from finished reacting to the situation, I can tell you that much. But you're right, he's caught for the moment in that unenviable place between guilt and anger, where the things he feels about himself are almost unbearable to hear from someone else, primarily because he knows they're true. Steve did pull a bit of a fast one there, didn't he? I know it's hard to imagine him willingly going back to a relationship like this, but I personally found it harder to imagine him leaving it. I think that regardless of what harm might come to himself, he knows that Tony needs him, and he wants to help Tony fix what he's broken. Tony's not the only dysfunctional one, here. Thank you so much for your very thorough feedback, I love every word. Here's more for you!

**Anonymous2004**: Any chance I can take you up on that for my next story? I'm already on pins and needles about it so a general feedbacker would be a pretty welcome addition for me. And thank you for suspending your doubt about the subject matter and giving this a chance. I had my qualms about tackling this myself, it's such a dark and controversial subject... but really, that's why I relate to it. Thank you so very much!

**Fleur**: (Part 1) Thank you! And can you believe I STILL haven't seen it? They tanked it out of theaters in the town where I live the day I went to see if it was still playing. Just my luck. I figure I'll see if I can find it playing anywhere else nearby before its completely gone. That would really suck, and would mark the first superhero movie I didn't see in theaters! Gotta keep my record golden. :) (Part 2) Were you really crying? Oh my gosh, I can't even imagine... I'm so glad you enjoyed this scene, it was absolutely brutal to write, and even looking back at it I can't say that I'm completely satisfied with it. And I did find your description funny, thank you for that. XD

**K.T. Tag**: I think if you could see the way I react in real life to your reviews you might think less of me as an author, haha. I get all giddy and smiley and ridiculous. It's quite undignified. I always love your reviews: this time I loved that you picked up on Steve's self-doubt and the way it is still rooted in childhood fears ( thread I was planning to explored in the next story), and especially Bruce's understated part in all of this, and the fact that he's not impervious to the part he's playing in Steve's self-destruction. Please, don't ever apologize, and stalk away! I love having loyal readers, it always encourages me to write more and write better. I don't have anything original that is complete, but if you'd like to hear about the novel I'm working on feel free to PM me. Thank you!

**PumpkinSpiceLatte**: Ah, thank you! That's exactly what I love so much about Captain America, and it comes into play even more in the next few chapters. And yes, Steve has a golden heart but he is still human and is making mistakes and trying to deal with them in imperfect ways. Oh, Tony is not getting off that easily, believe me. No-one is going to let him get away with what he's done, including himself. It will be touched on in the last several chapters, but the next story I am planning is really going to highlight the idea of the aftermath and consequences of everything that happened in this story, and how deep the damage really runs (of course with a nasty little plot twist thrown in for kicks!). I love these characters to death but they have a lot of suffering left to go, that's for certain. Thank you so much for reading between the lines, and I can't wait to hear from you again!


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